Exit by Belinda Bauer

Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pages, $26

“Exit” is a thriller with humor. It’s not a fast-paced book; it is a well-paced one. There are quite a few characters, but you’ll sort them out. (Take notes!) Belinda Bauer is an author with kindness to spare. Her characters are quirky but human, mean but human, smart or average or sly but human. Before you know it, Belinda Bauer has packed a whole lot of story into her book.

Felix Pink has an alias. To those in the business of helping people out of this world, he is known as “John.” Every “Exiteer” has an alias. Anonymity protects people whose calling it is to assist people with terminal ailments with taking their own lives. The small group of people who have become the Exiteers somehow were discovered by Geoffrey who tries to organize them. He schedules the appointments and assigns a pair of Exiteers to each case.

Felix is an older gentleman and he meets twenty-something Amanda, a first-timer. Together they travel to keep an appointment with Charles Cann. When they get to Cann’s house, they find an older man in the front bedroom gasping for breath. He is ashen and looks to be in some pain. He can’t respond to them, but the Exiteer’s release paper is on his bedside table, the nitrous oxide canister, with which he will quietly slip into death, is beside the bed, and his will is there as well. Everything seems ready to go. Uh, oh. (Well, there has to be an “uh-oh” because that’s how you get a story.) The mask slips away from Mr. Cann’s grasp. Amanda helpfully grabs it and puts it in Mr. Cann’s hand. Felix gasps. Exiteers are not allowed to help with the suicide in any way. What Exiteers do is not illegal but it is a fine line between watching a person die and murder.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the wrong Mr. Cann has died. As Amanda and Felix are leaving, an even older man down the hall asks Felix what took the Exiteers so long. He has been waiting for them to begin his suicide.

Uh, oh.

Felix is a kind soul with a wish to do good and a need to feel useful. His wife died a few years ago and his dog, Mabel, is his sole comfort. He was a tad depressed and aimless before finding the Exiteers. Even the cheerful woman who lives next door, Miss Knott, makes him want to run away. The Exiteers seemed a godsend. Now, with the erroneous death, his mission in life seems doomed and his final resting place will be a prison cell.

Instead of calling the police once he realized the error in identity, Felix pushes Amanda out the front door and tells her to leave, that he will take care of everything. Then he hightails it out the back door. Once he gets home, the law-abiding Felix expects the police to arrive to arrest him at any minute. He tries to prepare for that. But it appears that is not such a simple process. For one thing, Felix worries about Charles Cann, left to his own devices with a dead man in his house and not a flipping thing he can do to hasten his own death.

Although there are a few village names mentioned, I have no idea just where this action takes place in England. The police do eventually become involved but which precinct is a mystery. (You are invited to enlighten me if you figure it out.) Constable Calvin Bridge is seconded to DCI Kirsty King to help with the investigation of who murdered Mr. Albert Cann. Albert’s son Reggie is shocked. Charles, Albert's father, is mad. The housecleaner is useless.

PC Bridge is a local lad and he knows a lot of people. We follow him as he tries to get food out of a vending machine in the station, place bets at the local betting shop, and faithfully accomplish the boring tasks assigned him by DCI King. He is a real sweetheart.

Police and locals pass in and out of the various stories. If you have read Belinda Bauer before, you will know that no one is extraneous. And that is, in a nutshell, the joy of reading her stories.

About Felix walking Mabel in the neighborhood, Bauer says this:

Miss Knott was always interrupting their walks to engage him about Mabel, as if she were a Crufts* winner and not a scrubbing-brush mutt with breath that could strip paint.

* British dog show.

Felix is seventy-five years old and he is surprised by how that affects his life:

Felix Pink’s days of buying clothes were over. He had bought his last three-pack of Y-fronts a year ago, and the socks he had now would see him out. It was a strange feeling — that he would be outlived by his socks.

Although it had already happened with other things, of course.

The last house.

The last car.

Felix wondered how finely he might judge it. How low he could go. The last can of shaving foam? The last jar of jam? He sometimes wondered whether his last dying thought would be of a half-pint of milk going to waste in his fridge.

Belinda Bauer is a treat. Her book is genuinely pleasing. MBTB star!