*Disclaimer, I work for the publisher but views are my own*
There are a lot of interesting elements in this book and I particularly found the lead character’s moral code disturbing but intriguing.
Natalie Pela’s performance was very engaging and brought the characters to life.
Unfortunately, I didn’t want to keep listening after (spoiler alert) the dog dies.

Unusually for a 'crime' novel, this one has stuck in my head since I read it a few months ago. I say 'crime' because even though crimes are committed, it's more a psychological portrait than a crime novel. A portrait of a young woman raised and trained since childhood to be an assassin. Cilla is specialised in 'dry' jobs -- deaths that will appear as though from natural causes.

Cilla is a wonderful character, skillfully brought to life. Intelligent and highly resourceful, she kills without emotion or compassion. And yet, as a reader you're rooting for her. Not because she's charming (like, say, Dexter/Michael C. Hall or Eve/Jodie Comer) but almost in spite of her lack of charm. You root for her because you empathise with her, raised to be a killer and herself deprived of any love or compassion. As a child, she had to hide any emotion or it would be used against her or her family.

Helen Erichsen is a skilled writer. As a debut, this is an impressive and original novel. It's quite possible that the portrayal of Cilla's Russian school and handlers is rather clichéd.... But who knows? You will hardly be surprised to learn that my knowledge of the true internal workings of the Russian secret service is somewhat limited. It's still a compelling backstory and very convincing in the telling.

The novel jumps between two timelines: Cilla's childhood in Russia and the present day in London. Each story is gripping, so you don't really find yourself liking one story more than the other; the balance is just right.

The novel is quite graphic in parts but not at all in the way that I have come to dislike so much: those formulaic psychopathic serial killer novels that compete to portray the most twisted and unlikely killers or scenarios (a tired formula that continues to be churned out by some bestselling authors...). No. Murder by Natural Causes is not 'about' the murders or the blood and guts, it's not written to incite horror and revulsion. It's basically a nature/nurture debate and ultimately just quite sad, really.

Over the past year, I've been reading a slew [pun intended!] of novels about female killers. Its obviously an attractive theme for publishers, no doubt fueled in part by the success of Killing Eve. And what can I say? -- I'm a fan. I'm tired of reading about women as victims of male violence. If I'm going to use murder as light entertainment, at least it's nice for the protagonist to be a woman. Especially if she's good at her job.

Enjoy.

Note on the narration: I listened to the audio version of Murder by Natural Causes, superbly interpreted by Natalie Pela. 5* for the narration.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for providing an ARC. All my reviews are 100% honest no matter how I acquire the book.

A really enjoyable tale of the macabre with a delightful twist in the tale.

One shouldn’t really enjoy it or find the characters engaging, but they are and I did.

An enjoyable way to pass a few hours, well narrated and a good pace to the story.

If you liked Killing eve or Russian spy drams then you will devour this book. Tells the story of a young girl, identified as different at school and taken to a special academy where she learns to be an assassin amongst other sills. Fascinating build up to the main character and her life of crime eventually leading to her efforts to be normal. Thank you #NetGalley for the audiobook to review.

A great start. Quirky characters, a solid plot, will defo read more from this author, right up my street!

Murder by Natural Causes by
This was a fabulous audiobook. It was quite the thriller with an enigmatic MC. I loved the attention to detail given. And it was fast paced and well rounded. The MC is definitely a gray character and no attempts have been made to picture her as an innocent. Nor has the author tried to justify her. We are given insights into the characters previous life and it is entirely up to us as to whether we should judge or not.
The audio per se was top notch. Loved the modulation and the narration. It was completely engaging

An exciting thriller read with twists that keep you guessing till the end! Thank you NetGalley and Bookouture for this ARC!

This was an enjoyable thriller. Murder, poison, Russian spys (groomed as children), The Berlin Wall and a baddy named Vlad the Impaler .
Great read for people that like stealthy assassins.

Overall, a pretty successful audiobook which was, for me anyway, mostly down to the narrator who was excellent and really brought the characters to life.

The book is told entirely from Cilla's point of view and tells the story of how she got to be who she is and the now. I wouldn't say it is full of action or thrills and spills which, from the synopsis anyway, I did assume would be the case but rather a detailed look into how a child with certain traits can be shaped and moulded to become a successful killer and the cunning and skills she used when plying her trade and which she is now using to try and change her life.

As I said, it's not full of action and whilst there is some suspense, this mainly comes towards the end and this was, for me, a little disappointing - it's a little too slow and lacking in oomph! I did however like getting to know Cilla and whilst at first I found her hard to 'like', she did grow on me in the end.

Overall, a little underwhelming and although I did finish it, I was left with a sense of "was that it?". My thanks go to Bolinda Audio and NetGalley for enabling me to listen to and share my thoughts of Murder by Natural Causes.

This is essence how an ordinary soviet girl was trained and became a contract killer. On the surface she seemed happy with her double life but was she really?
The story intrigued me from the start. The narrator was a perfect choice as her tone reflected the matter of factness and the emotion of characters. The selective usafe of accents and good knowledge of soviet and uk history gave tge character good growding. I teally enjoyed the fact that murder was talked about so matter of factly especially by the main character. It was also so believable and enjoybable. The violence was somehow more real by narrators lack of emotion. I enjoyed every minute. Highly recommended. Thank you net galkwey and publisher for my arc

This was brilliant!
This was a really interesting take, and very cleverly executed! Kind of like the premise...
As soon as I started, this reminded me of Killing Eve, the BBC TV drama series. (Worth a watch, btw.)
A woman is hired to kill people, but not to make it look like an accident- even better, to make it look like the victim died of natural causes.
This was so clever, the deaths were absolutely brilliant!
The narrator was excellent, and I raced through it in just 2 days.

I liked some aspects of the plot and the narrator was very good, but I didn't really get a feel for the main character. Although you will get to know everything about her childhood and upbringing, I still think there is something lacking and for some reason it didn't really connect with me. I did like how it ended and overall it was a pleasant listen.
Thanks to NetGalley, the editor and the author for the opportunity to access this ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bolinda Audio for the advance audio book.

I enjoyed the reader Natalie Pela’s way of giving life to the characters in the book, which was a big part of me continuing and finishing the audiobook.

I don’t know how I felt about this book. It was a little slow to get to where it needed and I had a lot of questions that were left unanswered once it was done.

The main character Cilla is a 22 year old assassin who never really had a childhood and weirdly doesn’t read/sound like a 22 year old. Even with her having no formative years, there was a weirdness to how she spoke about herself and also just life in general.

I’m not too sure who to recommend this book to as it’s not a thriller, espionage or action book, but has some of those elements running through. I guess go into with no expectations and see how you feel afterwards.

Cilla was picked as a young girl to be a recruit for the elite Academy 43. She is skilled in weapons and poisonings.

Cilla is now a contract killer. She specialises in dry kills. As in those that look like deaths by natural causes. She is able to get at victims other killers are unable too.. she operates under the radar but being so successful means her days could be numbered. She needs to find a way out of her current career..

Unbelievably, you find yourself rooting for Cilla despite what her career is. She is just a product of the state. The narrator of the audiobook brought the character to life. I laid listening to this on the beach. And unusually for me I didn’t fall asleep as I was invested in the story. The story was told in current and past storylines.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to see an ARC

A less amoral Villanelle.

Loved Killing Eve (the book and the TV series) and of course, Villanelle will come to mind when reading this. Cilla is also Russian and trained from a young age with 'special skills', killing people for money.

But Cilla isn't quite the psychopath Jodie Comer portrayed. A lot of her backstory gives us her background, with family, dogs and a rabid intellect that sets her apart and sees her taken away to a secret school for training at the age of 11. Not knowing what it is she is being trained for, excelling in toxicology and English, we watch the story move back and forth between Cilla's schooling and her current situation as retained contract killer by London kingpin Vlad.

Villanelle was stunning, a standout beauty and mistress of disguise (and fashion). Cilla is non-descript, neither strong nor memorable. But she is well-trained with a wealth of chemical and potions at her disposal and the ability to make her murders appear as accidents or as the result of natural causes. And she's getting tired, at 22, of being at Vlad's command and having no future outside of murder.

On top of that, we learn that she's occasionally NOT fulfilled a contract, using her own moral compass to let targets live. Cilla has her own mind and will and wants out. Thus the story allows the reader the background to the creation of a contract killer, those scenes we all enjoy of seeing such contracts fulfilled, and then the wait to see if the assassin herself is able to extricate herself from her life and start anew...

A very engaging audiobook, didn't lose concentration once, enjoyed the narrator's voice as Cilla and even sped it up to 2x speed to keep the flow! Not too gory for its genre, but with plenty of detail on training, plants and toxins, Communist ideology and hit-planning.

If it wasn't so soon after Killing Eve, I'd want this put on television as well!

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample audio copy.

Superb story of a young peasant Russian girl hand picked and trained to be a deadly assassin. Able to trust no one she seeks the protection of a psychopathic gang leader in London. Her speciality is the intricately researched and planned “death by natural causes” which leave no trace to arouse suspicion. Reminiscent of both Villeneuve in Killing Eve and Rhiannon in Sweetpea, I was rooting for her.

Read this is you like:
✔️Characters who break the mould.
✔️ An insight into a usual job and a totally different lifestyle.
✔️Books with ambiguous endings.

What a fantastic audiobook. I was hooked right away. I was so intrigued by Cilla and her job as an assassin specialising in “dry jobs” where it someone is murdered in such a way where it looks like natural causes.
The author has a fantastic writing style and I kept looking forward to long commutes so I had a big chunk of time to listen to the book. The narrator is engaging and brilliant, really bringing all the characters to life and her accents were really believable too. I initially didn’t enjoy the chapters set in the past which explored how Cilla became an assassin, and really disliked the two week holiday back home she had.
It makes me sound like a psychopath myself, but I’d have preferred more chapters set in the present, with Cilla performing more assignments, because I thought the way she researched everything about the targets into order to come up with a natural looking death, was really clever and intriguing.
I have never met a character like Cilla and I really rooted for her and her aspirations. I loved the items she collected to show her autonomy, and with that ambiguous ending, I am sure never to forget her. Now, I am off to listen to the last chapter again for clues!

I cannot believe that this is a debut novel. It’s quite different to anything that I’ve read before. Flipping between two timelines we meet Cilla the contract killer. A 22 year old living in London and working as a contract killer, dry kill’s specifically as the title suggests, dry kills that look like natural causes. As we work back through time we discover the strict regime that plucked her as a child from school and trained her to be the killer she is. There’s a high body count as you’d expect. The detail is delicious. She’s sharp, she’s astute and she’s calculated but as time goes by you discover Cilla has plans for the future and my god you fall in love with this young woman and root for her til the very end.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bolinda Audio for the opportunity to listen to this Audiobook in return for an honest review.

3.75⭐️ rounded up.

<i> Cilla is a 22-year-old contract killer, specialising in the dry job: a murder interpreted as death by natural causes. Neither strong, nor beautiful, she isn’t your typical female protagonist. In fact, she is so unremarkable as to render her almost invisible, an advantage in her line of work.

Cilla has survived because she is clever, stubborn and lucky. Plus, the weapons training and lessons on poison at the elite Academy 43 have stood her in good stead. But statistically her luck is bound to run out. She must find a way to reinvent herself. Soon. </i>

This was a decently enjoyable read, as you got to see both the beginning and the end of Cilla’s career as a contract killer- what made her the way she is, and both why and how she decided to move on from killing people. This isn’t my normal sort of read, but I did find some fascination in the way the story makes you increasingly sympathetic to Cilla. I listened to the audiobook of this, and it was narrated skillfully by Natalie Pela.

* I received an ARC of this audiobook from NetGalley and Bolinda Audio in exchange for an honest review.

Quite a clever cover, look at the shadow for a sense of what is to come.
Excellent narration, capturing Cilla’s changing emotions well and had a bit of fun with the Russian accents.

The story starts with a backgammon shark winning much more than is wise to from a reckless young gambler, but one with important connections. On discovering this error, he decides to run, only to come across Cilla Wilson with a baby in a pram at the airport WH Smith. Cilla is no young mother though, she is a deadly contract killer who specialises in dry jobs, those that appear to be death by natural causes.

The plot follows two strands of Cilla’s life, one is her current (early 1990’s) life in England, the other her childhood past in Russia. The narrative regularly moves between the two, but this is seamless to the progression and straightforward to follow. A nicely constructed narrative.

In the ‘current’ strand we follow Cilla as she works as the in-house killer for Vlad, a ruthless gangster with casino and drugs interests who runs a high stakes bridge and backgammon club as his base. For a retainer and a nice flat to live in, Cilla makes his people problems go away. She also has the relative freedom to do jobs on a freelance basis, for which she charges £50,000 a time. As time progresses though she realises this is not a life, she wants normality.

The historical strand follows her shattered and disturbing childhood. Living in a rural family that is struggling and largely uncaring, we discover that Luna the dog is the only one she holds affection for, she is selected to go to a special school, Academy 43. Here their special talents are nurtured, but also, they are gradually desensitised to suffering and killing, to become highly trained killers.

A central theme is that of escape from an existence that is predetermined and one where once she has served her purpose, she becomes superfluous to requirements. The reality is assassins don’t get the chance to retire, they are erased by their successors. Here the stark reality faces Cilla as there are parallels in her life. She escapes the Russians only by working under the protection of Vlad. If she is to escape from Vlad who is going to protect her then?

Naturally with the story centring on murder there are some gory descriptions and a little casual torture but it’s not visceral and ‘in your face’ as dry jobs are supposed to look like natural causes. If your spouse suddenly takes an interest in archery or buying lots of cherries, you might want to start paying attention though.
Dark subject matter but with nicely judged light-hearted moments. In the Russian school they are allowed to watch VHS recordings of British TV and Cilla develops a taste for sitcoms, managing to watch every episode of The Liver Birds (and this wasn’t part of the desensitisation!) Her developing love of all things Liverpudlian is only then enhanced by her choice of English name Cilla, surprise surprise, due to her love of Cilla Black.

Cilla is a fascinating character, intelligent and thoughtful, a lover of philosophy reading the works of Kant and Nietzsche but with a stunted development when it comes to life in the West. So, we get to experience her discomfort in social interaction with her peers and various rites of passage western youngsters would have met a younger age. The timing of the story is a little confusing but makes perfect sense, covering as it does the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. The upheaval and change experienced in the East becomes an allegory for what Cilla goes through herself, as she sees the possibility of a better life ahead, one with some freedom. An individual with a life and personality blossoming for the barren wasteland of a past forced upon her. It feels like to start of a journey, perhaps there will be more to follow one day.

Naturally I would like to thank the Author, Publisher and NetGalley for making this recording available in exchange for a fair review.