Book review: Kill Your Boss by Jack Heath

Kill Your Boss by Jack Heath is the third in the ‘Kill your….’ series featuring DS Kiara Lui. I jokingly tried to guess what the next one would be in my review of Kill Your Husbands… one of my guesses was ‘colleagues’.

I was close but no banana. Though many will relate to this as I’m fairly sure most of us have had a horrendous boss at some point in their life. In a letter by Heath (in the review copy I received) he talks about unlikeable characters and it has to be said the victim here—Neville—is certainly that. In fact I love that no one (other than the victim’s parents) even pretends to have a good word to say about the victim… so the suspects are many!

Detective Sergeant Kiara Lui has just broken up a very loud and very public fistfight between two blokes in the main street of the small town of Warrigal. But just as she's leaving the scene, a man inexplicably plummets from the sky and slams into the bike rack right in front of her, dead.

The only place he could have fallen from is the library's roof and Kiara, after running through scenarios of suicide or tragic accident, realises there could be much more in play and locks the doors of the building. With no possible movement in or out, the library holds a handful of suspects. If it's murder, one of them must be guilty. And Kiara quickly finds out that the library is sheltering more than one person with reasons to kill this boss.

Suicide seems to be the obvious conclusion here, except the wily Kiara notices Neville had not finished the cigarette he was smoking (which was why he was on the roof in the first place) and she assumes if you were planning to end your life, you’d surely enjoy your last cigarette.

Again Heath jumps about in time, offering backstory and context… all timed perfectly. We travel from the present to moments before Neville hits the ground to months before, when we learn a local woman went missing who has ties to one of the suspects here. I appreciated the way Heath blends the characters and their lives as we meet staff from the library and their loved ones as it means they’re complex and all seem to be hiding something from Kiara and / or each other.

This is the quintessential locked-room mystery (well, locked building in fact) which should limit the suspect pool but the interrelatedness of the characters means the murder may not have been someone with an obvious motive, rather someone enacting vengeance on their behalf.

When this opens, Kiara’s returned from her honeymoon and again I found her to be an engaging lead and dogged detective. I very much liked newcomer Ben, a young Probationary Constable on his first rural posting. Another thing I appreciate about this series is that Heath shies away from the oft-used rancour between police officers and with their bosses. Here there’s limited workplace baggage… although the same cannot be said for the library.

This is another great addition to the series, a fun and twisty read and again I appreciated Heath’s sense of humour (or at least his ‘take’ on human nature).

Kill Your Boss by Jack Heath was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin.

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.