Book review: We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker

It’s rare that I review older books here rather than new releases but my print book arrivals have dried up lately so I’m reading some books I missed when originally published. We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker is one of those books I heard a lot about at the time. I’d been thinking about going to Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at the time (finally making it in 2023) so following along when Whitaker won the Best Fiction award for We Begin At The End. I’ve meant to get my hands on a copy ever since and finally did so. It’s a fairly hefty tome (for crime fiction) at 450+ pages but if I could, I would have read it in a sitting. Instead taking two and I eagerly devoured it. It offers everything I love in a book. It’s bloody well written, it’s thought-provoking with a lot of grey (rather than black and white), it resulted in a roller coaster of feelings and emotions, AND it features a young narrator, which I adore as it can be hard to do well, but when it is… addictive perfection burying me in their world and life.

We Begin at the End
by Chris Whitaker
Published by Zaffre
on 06/08/2020
Source: Purchased
Genres: Crime Fiction, Literary Fiction
ISBN: 1785769405
Pages: 452

Goodreads

Right. Wrong. Life is lived somewhere in between.

Duchess Day Radley is a thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Rules are for other people. She is the fierce protector of her five-year-old brother, Robin, and the parent to her mother, Star, a single mom incapable of taking care of herself, let alone her two kids.

Walk has never left the coastal California town where he and Star grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. And he’s in overdrive protecting Duchess and her brother.

Now, thirty years later, Vincent is being released. And Duchess and Walk must face the trouble that comes with his return. We Begin at the End is an extraordinary novel about two kinds of families—the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Wow, what a ride this book was. It’s a book of love and hope of loss and redemption. We’re offered rich textured characters, some of whom we don’t meet for long but they leave their mark nonetheless. Thirteen year old Duchess is sassy and obsessed with long-passed-relative and using his ‘outlaw’ title herself. Local cop and close friend of all of those involved 30 years earlier, Chief Walker (Walk) is a droll and pragmatic yet sensitive host.

Whitaker’s writing is exquisite… I started marking paragraphs and phrases but had to stop lest I destroy the whole book.

Behind, the sun fell with the building, dissecting the water with cuts of orange and purple and shades without name. The reporter got her piece, seeing a patch of history so slight it barely counted. p 6

And this…

Night met others just like it*, each swallowing Duchess so totally she knew she would not see day again, not the way other kids saw it. p 9

I’ve not got the words to share how much I enjoyed this book. It took me on a tumultuous journey, one I feared wouldn’t end well, but one I would not have missed for the world. As Duchess’s grandfather Hal said… “We begin at the end.”

I’m hearing great things about his latest release, All the Colours of the Dark, so now desperately need to get my hands on that.

* Oh, be still my beating, prose-loving heart

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