Off Script

by Graham Hurley

Overview

Actress Enora Andressen must find a killer, and there's no script to guide her . . .

Carrie Tollman awakes in the middle of the night with an intruder gazing down at her. He’s young. He seems crazy. He tells her he’s killed before and he’ll kill again. One word about what’s happened, and he’ll be back. Carrie is one of two carers looking after Enora Andressen’s favorite scriptwriter. But Pavel is now paralysed, as well as blind, and it falls to Enora to track down this terrifying presence at Carrie’s bedside.

Enora’s journey takes her deep into the netherworld of homelessness, neglect, and the unaddressed torments of people – young and old – failing to cope with their demons. Nothing has ever prepared her for this . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780296883
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Series:	An Enora Andressen thriller , #3
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.74(h) x (d)

About the Author

Graham Hurley is an award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. His Faraday and Winter series won two Theakstons shortlist nominations and was successfully adapted for French TV. He has since written a quartet of novels featuring D/S Jimmy Suttle, and three WW2 novels, the first of which – Finisterre – was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. The first two titles in the Enora Andressen series, Curtain Call and Sight Unseen, are also available from Severn House. After thirty years in Portsmouth, Graham now lives in East Devon with his wife, Lin.

Editorial Reviews

"A first-rate mystery with an exciting premise... It's all told in a stiff-upper-lip British style that makes the eventual revelations even more powerful"

Booklist

"A first-rate mystery with an exciting premise... It's all told in a stiff-upper-lip British style that makes the eventual revelations even more powerful"

Booklist

04/13/2020

British author Hurley’s bizarre third Enora Andressen thriller (after 2019’s Sight Unseen) takes 40-ish actor Enora, a single mother and brain cancer survivor who sleuths on the side, from her posh London home to Exmouth, where she has been summoned by Carrie Tollman, the nurse for Enora’s blind, paraplegic former lover, Pavel Sieger. Carrie woke up one night recently to find a wild-eyed young man in her bedroom. He threatened to kill her if she mentioned him to anyone, just like he’d killed some unspecified others. Someone later fatally slashes Carrie’s stomach, and a prime suspect goes missing. Enora can’t resist gushing about soirees aboard a fabulous sailboat and visits to a deeply intimate spa as she closes in on a vicious killer. Enora also gets involved with a “big, broad-chested” Dutchman she meets at a pub, a typically impulsive move that lands her in trouble. This erratic outing is unlikely to win Enora new fans. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (June)

Publishers Weekly

2020-03-15
In her third appearance, actress Enora Andressen leads the search for the boy who broke into a woman's flat and threatened her with death before he vanished.

Since an accident left the blind Pavel Sieger, her favorite scriptwriter, paralyzed, Enora’s dedicated herself to making sure he’s well cared for. Now one of his dedicated medical minders, nurse Carrie Tollman, has been the victim of an encounter so harrowing Enora has to drag the details out of her. She awoke to find a teenager bending over her. The intruder stared at her, assured her that he can get through any locked door, attempted to masturbate, and then, when she laughed at him and ordered him to leave, told her that if she shared her story with anyone else, “he’d come back and kill me. Just like he’d killed the others.” Sure enough, soon after Enora unearths enough information to allow the Exmouth police to arrest a boy they then have to release for lack of evidence, she returns to Carrie’s place to find her slashed to death. Even when an oddly literal clue allows Enora to put a name to the presumed culprit, he’s nowhere to be found. Enora’s only solace is the distractions of an unwelcome visit from her teenage son, Malo, and a much more welcome romance with builder/sailor/“chancer” Deko, a relationship that despite some exhilarating adventures turns out to have disturbing complications of its own.

Not so much mysterious as creepy and just plain sad.

Kirkus Reviews