Dr Hugh Westlake’s main concern was simply what to get his daughter, Dawn (aka “brat!” or “heathen!” ) for her eleventh birthday. Luckily she has dropped some unsubtle hints that she wants a pair of Belgian hares (a species of rabbit, despite the name) because she wants to breed them. Kids, eh?
His rabbit research is interrupted by a local news story where he is named as a champion of euthanasia – it was actually a Dr Westbrook – and hey presto, he receives s summons by one Madeleine Talbot, a terminally ill patient who wants exactly that. Westlake refuses, but the next day, Mrs Talbot is dead from an overdose. Was it self-inflicted? Did someone in her family offer her mercy? Or did someone in her family see the need to murder her outright?
And why are there so many missing cats?
So foxes in the first book, cats and ickle bunny rabbits in this one? Did Webb and Wheeler (aka Jonathan Stagge) really not like animals? I should say that we don’t get explicit descriptions of bad things, but still – don’t think about it too hard.
Right, that’s the trigger-warning out of the way…
This one is a bugger to find in the UK. I’ve spent the last couple of years collecting the Westlake series – not an easy task by any means – but this one has always eluded me. But a quick trip to the Bodleian meant I could read it. It’s so hard to find with the UK title that I can’t find a picture of the dustjacket anywhere – hence the US paperback cover above.
As you might be able to guess, there’s a reasonable amount of discussion of the right to die here – and… something else that I suppose is a spoiler. In fact, there’s a whole aspect of the book that I can’t talk about, because… Oh, I can’t talk about it because if I tell you my issue with this, it would give away something massive. I spent the whole book waiting for one thing or the other to happen, and when the first one didn’t, it made the ending – which would have been a good surprise if I’d read the book when it had been published.
And then there’s a couple of characters who are just nasty. Nasty enough to be murderers? Maybe. But the fact that some aspects of their behaviour that they seem to get away with by the end of the tale that are odd choices.
That’s quite a lot of moaning for a book that I enjoyed quite a bit, isn’t it? It keeps moving forward, with Westlake’s career and life in serious jeopardy – the morphine used for the murders was stolen out of his case. Add in an emotional story for Westlake – Dawn’s role in this gives her one of her better roles in the series – and there really is a lot to like here. Definitely worth tracking down, if you can, but it’s not perfect by any means.
