Exit by Belinda Bauer

 

The advice for retired folks is to develop a hobby.  Felix's is to be an Exiteer.  The Exiteer is there to assist terminally ill patients choose their own death.  He supplies the materials, stays there with the patient until they pass, then removes all evidence.  Felix hopes one day someone will be there for him if he makes the decision to go sooner than life wants him to.

This should be a routine case except that Felix will be working with a new partner.  She is introduced to him as John and gives her name as Amanda.  No one knows an Exiteer's real name except the man who runs the entire operation.  The man they have come to assist is upstairs in bed, not able to speak but able to perform the tasks he needs to.  As John and Amanda are about to leave after the death, they hear someone down the hall.  They check and find an even older, sicker man in that bedroom.  They have assisted the wrong man!  Is this murder?

The police are brought in but they aren't sure at first what they are seeing.  They soon find Felix, however, as he and Amanda are captured on cameras entering and leaving the house.  It turns out that three generations were living in the house, grandfather, father and son.  The Exiteers had contracted with the grandfather but had mistakenly assisted the father.  Was it a set up?  Did the son use them to kill his father so he could inherit everything when his sick grandfather died?  Felix is horrified and even more so when he sees Amanda of all people meeting and having tea with the son.  Was she part of the set-up?

Belinda Bauer is one of my favorite mystery authors.  She is English and now lives in Wales.  Bauer worked as a journalist until she wrote a book, Badlands, to appease her mother.  To everyone's amazement, it won the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel Of The Year.  Another of her novels, Snap, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.  She writes complex mysteries that feature an everyday person caught up in something they never expected but that their goodness and humanity help them negotiate.  In this novel, the reader watches Felix emerge from his cocoon as he tries to determine what really happened and what responsibility he and Amanda bear.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.