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| The Day Henry Died by Lynda Renham |
Synopsis
Suppose you wake up one morning to find yourself dead. You can see yourself clearly in the mirror, and feel the same as you did the day before. But today is the day of your funeral. What do you do?
This was Henry’s dilemma. Henry decides he can’t possibly be dead, so he sets out to prove he is alive. Then, he discovers that Rita, a product demonstrator at the supermarket, can see him.
Even with the help of Rita, proving you’re not dead was harder than Henry imagined, but when Henry discovered that he was murdered, the question was why and by whom?
My review
This was one of those books with a synopsis so intriguing I couldn’t turn it down, despite it having no link to France.
We meet Henry, his wife Imogen and his friend Rita in the most unusual circumstances. Henry wakes up to find nothing in his normal routine is the same and this makes him feel out of sorts, a feeling that only gets worse when he reads his own obituary in the newspaper over breakfast.
Henry is not one to be deterred, so he arrives at work as usual, to find no one can see or hear him and someone else is working from his desk. He tries to find his wife Imogen, but she isn’t at the greengrocers where she works, and at the back of the shop he finds her colleague preparing the flowers for his funeral, that afternoon. Desperate to find out what has gone wrong and why everyone thinks he’s dead, Henry needs a plan. Popping into the supermarket he is surprised to find that Rita, who he often chats to as he samples the products she is demonstrating, can see him and hear him.
Together they take the bus, in the rain, to Henry’s funeral. It is not at all what Henry had imagined, it’s in a church for starters and most of the small congregation he hardly knows. He needs Rita’s help to put right this mistake of being dead and let Imogen know he’s OK. Rita is frightened of death, but not of Henry, in fact the more she gets to know him, the more she enjoys his company and having someone in her life, even if he is dead.
Henry is a precise man, has a well-ordered and perfect life, but being dead makes him see that under the surface maybe things weren’t so perfect after all. He revisits major moments in his married life and gets to see things he never noticed at the time. Can he find a way to get back to Imogen and can what he now knows make a difference to his future?
This book is certainly something different and stretches what we think of as normal in life and death. I like different and enjoyed Henry’s after death journey, and despite my best efforts to work out where it was leading, had no idea what would happen.
Author bio
Lynda Renham is author to many popular romantic comedy and gripping psychological thriller novels. She lives in Oxford, UK. She has appeared on BBC radio discussion programs and is a prolific blogger, Twitter and when not writing can usually be found wasting her time on Facebook. Lynda lives in Oxfordshire with her second husband and two cats.
Buy links
This book is available in kindle and paperback versions from 1st June 2020 and the kindle price is currently only 99p / $1.21
What an unusual premise! Thanks for this.
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