Remi Kone

Leah Hutch is a detective working with London’s Metropolitan Police, and she has two murders to solve. That of Ray King is bizarre. His corpse is found on the downstairs sofa of Gabriel McMahon – who swears he has never met the dead man. Sarah Franks, a teacher with a drug problem is found with her throat cut in her dingy flat.
It is an unwritten rule of crime fiction, at least in Britain, that police detectives have to be emotionally damaged in some way. I could list examples, but most CriFi fans will know what I mean. Leah Hutch ticks most of the boxes. Her father, Eli Carson, murdered her mother and boyfriend when Leah was little, and is now serving a life sentence. Leah was brought up by her paternal grandmother, Margaretta who was loving – but in her own peculiar way.
A friend from Hutch’s schooldays, Sami Mograbi, is found near the scene of Sarah’s murder, but there is no evidence to connect him with the killing.There is also an apparently unconnected parallel plot. A teenager, Zechariah Okoro – known as Zed – is troubled, because his mother has gone missing. The conundrum about what Zed has to do with the story resolves in dramatic fashion. The boy, alone in his mother’s bouse for 24 hours, has noticed a man watching the property. After following the stranger across London, Zed sees the man leave his home, apparently for a run. Zed breaks in. The next thing we know is that Hutch and her sidekick Randle have decided to pay Gabriel McMahon a visit. No reply to their knocks. They phone him and hear his mobile ringing inside the house. After forcing an entry, they find two people. McMahon is dead. Very dead, his blood spattered over the walls. The second person is a terrified Zed, in a foetal crouch, hiding in a wardrobe.
Approaching the half way point of the novel, we have are led to believe that there is a professional killer at work. We know him as Chris. He is currently employed by someone as yet unknown, and we assume he is responsible for the deaths of Sarah Franks, Ray King, Gabriel McMahon and – possibly – the disappearance of Zed’s mother. My initial reaction was that Chris doesn’t ‘disappear’ people – he simply murders them and leaves their corpses to provide puzzles for the police.
Zed’s mother, Ogechi Okoro, is eventually found alive, after being kidnapped and tortured. Hutch finally discovers a link between Okoro, McMahon and Mograbi. They all studied medicine together at university. But what of Sarah Franks, and Ray King? That question is temporarily pushed to one side when Mograbi is found dead, killed by the same clinical slash to the carotid artery that ended the lives of Sarah Franks and Gabriel McMahon.
Hutch discovers something else about the three former medical students – they each took time out to do what was basically work experience in Ghana. Hutch flies to Ghana to investigate – unofficially – and what she discovers not only links the three med students, but also Ray King and Sarah Franks. We also learn that a woman called Bisi, who we know has been followed by the mysterious killer, Chris, was also in the same Accra hospital.
There is yet another turn in the plot road, but this time it is more of a hairpin than a gentle bend. The killer of Sarah, Gabriel and Sami is brought to justice, and the final pages hint at a resolution to one of Hutch’s Great Unknowns – the location of her murdered mother’s grave.
British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and Just Kill is her second novel. It is cleverly written, with a veritable vortex of a plot, is published by Quercus and is available now.

The book begins with one of those ‘impossible’ events beloved of crime writers since the 19th century. It is a mystery involving not a locked room but a locked mind. A woman, later identified as Fiona Garvey, presents herself at a London police station covered in blood. Carrying a baseball bat. She is catatonic. Silent. Somewhere else altogether. Then, a body is found, battered to death in a London Park. It appears to be the mortal remains of Alistair Cowan, Fiona Garvey’s employer.

Investigating detective Leah Hutch has problems of her own. The woman who brought her up, Margaretta, has just died. Margaretta solicitor reveals to Leah that her actual father, who she neither knew nor ever met, was Eli Carson, Margaretta’s son and a former police officer. And Eli is serving two life terms for murdering his wife and the man he suspected was cuckolding him. The author then deepens the mystery with two further revelations. First, the blood on the baseball bat isn’t that of Alistair Cowan, but that on Garvey’s hands and body is. Just to set our minds spinning yet more feverishly, DNA tests on the body in the park do not match that of Alistair Cowan. But hang on … Chapter Four is a description of Alistair Cowan, lying somewhere, grievously injured, fighting for life so, as some people say, “what the actual ….?”

As if things were not complicated enough for DI Hutch, we have Odie Reid muddying the waters. She is – or was – an top investigative journalist for a tabloid newspaper. As print newspaper sales plummet, Odie’s career takes a parallel course. She knows Leah Hutch, as they were once both aspiring news hounds. Now, Leah bats for the opposition, and Odie needs to create the story that will save her career. The man police assumed was Alistair Cowan is identified, Cowan is found – just about – alive and after the forensic evidence leads the police to accuse Fiona Garvey of his murder she is remanded in custody.

Then, a third man, Jake Munro is attacked, this time fatally. He was a successful businessman who had bought up several firms, with consequent redundancies, so was he killed by a vengeful former employee? One such man, Eddie Adeola, had committed suicide after failing to get another job, and his wife – a strange and violent woman called Temi, after attacking police sent to interview her, has gone into hiding. Leah Hutch discovers a strange link between Temi and Fiona Garvey, and it is their attendance at events put on by a man called Brendan Klee. When Hutch and her sergeant Ben Randle interview him they are unsure if he is a fraud, a mentalist, a lifestyle guru, a shaman – or a blend of all four.

The denouement reflects a phenomenon which runs through the book like a spine, albeit one warped by scoliosis; this phenomenon is the endless – and almost unsolvable – mystery of what causes apparently decent people to commit acts of terrible evil, and whether or not those acts can be excused (or at least explained) by horrors inflicted on the perpetrators when they were much younger. Leah Hutch is a flawed – but credible heroine – with a past as steeped in horror as the worst of the crimes she has to investigate. Remi Kone is a British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer; she has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as Killing Eve, Spooks and Lewis. She lives in London, and this is her first novel. Innocent Guilt is published by Quercus and will be on the shelves on 15th May.