I read Tell Me How This Ends by Jo Leevers basking in the first real sun of the year in the garden some months ango and really enjoyed it. Its protagonist Henrietta Lockwood is a bit like Eleanor Oliphant – closed off from the world, a bit different and with hidden trauma. This means she finds work and life hard work and often finds she is fired without really knowing why. Her latest job is for The Life Stories Project – an initiative to capture the memories of the terminally ill in a book that their families can treasure. Henrietta’s pragmatic approach seems to fit the template that needs filling in very well but this is soon overturned when she meets her first client Annie Doyle.

Annie is dying and is determined to wear all the clothes she has never worn and to tell her story. Hers is not the hearts and flowers version of life that The Life Stories project has been set up to capture, rather it is a lonely life of loss, grief and domestic abuse. She starts with the disappearance of her sister Kath in 1974, whose clothes are found neatly piled up on the side of a London canal and then moves on to her marriage.

Henrietta isn’t willing to let this go and realising she doesn’t have much time left until Annie dies, goes on a sleuthing adventure to see if she can find out what happened to Kath. As she does, she starts to deal with the grief, loss and guilt that she and Annie have in common.

Together can Annie and Henrietta find peace, before it‘s too late?