Under SUSPICION
A POLICE DETECTIVE’S CASE FEELS CLOSE TO HOME
This novel is your classic crime drama flavoured with an added zing of chick lit. That’s partly thanks to the main detective Cat Kinsella, who’s young and single, with a messy life and a sparky personality. But there’s also generally more attention paid to girly stuff – from lipstick to fertility issues – than you’d find in the usual police procedural story and I liked the way this added an extra element to the format.
I also loved the mystery Cat is struggling to solve and the way her own past is tangled up in it. It all links back to a childhood holiday with her family in the west of Ireland. When a local girl, beautiful Marianne Doyle, goes missing, the eight-year-old Cat is convinced her father had something to do with it. That memory continues to haunt her.
Fast-forward to the present day and Cat is a police detective in London working on a murder case. The body of Alice Lapaine has been found not far from the pub Cat’s father runs. Since he associates with lots of local criminals, she’s worried. But when a link between Alice and the missing Marianne emerges, Cat begins to really panic that her father is involved.
Rather than coming clean to her bosses, she starts to dig around in the case and discovers the life of Alice Lapaine was far more complicated than anyone could have imagined.
Cat narrates the whole thing so the tension really mounts as she pieces together the clues in the knowledge her career is on the line. She’s wry and humorous, as well as being very fallible, and her voice is one of the best things about this story.
But it’s also satisfyingly twisty, with snappy dialogue, credible characters and a pacy plot. Police procedurals can skew towards the dull – sleuthing involves a lot of grilling suspects in interview rooms after all. But this one absolutely kept me hooked and, having set Cat up with some interesting colleagues, I believe there’s definitely scope for the author to bring her back to solve more murders in the future.