The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Book of the week
This gripping new thriller introduces a young female detective, Jo Masters, who is raring to go back to work after six months on maternity leave.
Determined not to do desk work, Jo throws herself into active duty.
Responding to her first emergency call, she is horrified to discover old friend and former colleague Harry Ferman unresponsive and covered in blood in his home in what appears to have been a burglary gone wrong.
On further investigation, evidence suggests Harry had a young guest staying, who has conveniently gone missing shortly after Harry’s murder.
As Jo and her colleagues dig deeper into the mystery more bodies are discovered in the same area.
Initially, there does not appear to be a correlation between the deaths, but as the body count begins to add up, Jo has to pull out all the stops to work out who and what is the missing link in the series of grisly scenarios.
I am always keen to read a novel featuring a strong female protagonist, and Jo was a multi-faceted character as both a new mother and a successful detective. Jo regularly suffers from “mum guilt”, and often feels that she is abandoning her young son in order to solve the case.
I felt that the author wrote sensitively about the topic of working mothers, and I enjoyed the character development as Jo learns to balance the two important parts of her life, and recognises that she can succeed in both her home and work life.
The is cleverly constructed and I was thankful that the author avoided following any of the typical thriller cliches, adding to the mystique which kept me guessing until the end. I genuinely could not connect the dots myself.
While the backstory of Jo and her relationship with the father of her baby added little to the overall plot, it prevented the story from becoming too stale and helped to present Jo in a more human way, which can often be neglected in detective fiction.
Admittedly, there is a lack of memorable secondary characters in this book, meaning that Jo really is the star of the show, but I felt this did not necessarily detract from the effectiveness of the plot as a whole.
Indeed, the ending of this novel makes it a truly worthwhile read, with each loose end tied up seamlessly, making for a very satisfying conclusion.
This is the perfect page turner for fans of detective and thriller fiction alike.
Review by Hollie Bruce.