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Book Summary and Reviews of Exit by Belinda Bauer

Exit by Belinda Bauer

Exit

by Belinda Bauer

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  • Published:
  • Feb 2021, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Belinda Bauer is "Britain's most original crime writer" (Crime Scene), one of the few authors in the genre to be longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Now she returns with a heart-pounding, heartbreaking, and often hilarious new crime novel in which it's never too late for life to go fatally wrong.

Felix Pink is retired. Widowed for more than a decade, a painfully literal thinker, he has led a life of routine and is, not unhappily, waiting to die a hopefully boring death. He occupies himself volunteering as an Exiteer―someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence so that family and friends are not implicated in the death. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath.

But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the police―after making the biggest mistake of his life. Now his routine world is turned upside down as he tries to discover whether what went wrong was a simple mistake―or deliberate. Murder.

Belinda Bauer continues to redefine the boundaries of crime fiction, with a novel that is part murder mystery, part coming-of-old-age story―however short that future may be. With the compassion and dark humor of Jonas Jonasson and the twisted thriller plotting of Rear Window, Exit is a novel readers will not soon forget.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[D]roll...Each distinctive character has a sense of humor sure to prompt belly laughs from the reader. Bauer knows how to entertain." - Publishers Weekly

"[D]arkly comic...A touching crime novel that explores the nature of life and death with heart and soul." - Kirkus Reviews

"Belinda Bauer's enjoyment of the complexity and unpredictability of human lives is contagious. Exit is pure guilty pleasure." - Thomas Perry, author of Eddie's Boy

"Bauer's unique trademark strengths make Exit quirky, charming, intensely human, important...and very suspenseful. I loved it." - Lee Child

This information about Exit was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer is the award-winning author of seven previous novels that have been translated into twenty-one languages. She won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Crime Novel of the Year for Blacklands, the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for Rubbernecker, and the CWA Dagger in the Library Award for outstanding body of work. Her previous novel, Snap, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Wales.

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