When homicide detective Brian “Brick” Kavanagh is assigned to the case of a young woman found floating in the Tidal Pool in Washington, D.C., the last thing he expects is a second murder to suddenly create an immediate and personal tie between himself and the victim. Hamstrung by a senior officer more interested in optics than actually solving crimes, Brick isn’t about to let this one slip through the cracks. The premise was interesting, and with victims from Guatemala and IC

Four people disappear from apparently quite comfortable lives. The only thing they appear to have in common is that each of them disappeared on their birthday… and each of them received a card wishing them a happy first birthday and inviting them to join a mysterious game. Digging deeper, psychologist Dr. Augusta Bloom and her investigative partner Marcus Jameson uncover something else the four have in common… they all displayed psychopathic tendencies. When a cyber investiga

While The Fourth Victim has a genuinely intriguing premise and the author has obviously done their research into both the realities of police work in present-day London and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), it’s very hard to read because the grammar is just glaringly awful. There are fundamental errors in the writing such as the failure to capitalize proper nouns (Asian, Muslim and Christian) and, having finished the book, I still don’t know who the protagonist of it was.

When a gang war breaks out in Dallas detectives Frank Pierce and Rob Solis are on the case, but right from the start, things don’t add up. The first victim appears to have been scared to death, a voodoo doll left at the scene the only clue, and a military-trained sniper is taking down gang leaders left and right in a very atypical modus operandi for gang-related killings. There’s some great stuff here, particularly in the extremely realistic feel all the police scenes have, f

Because my TBR is list always wildly out of control, it’s pretty uncommon for me to discover a new author and immediately go looking for more books they’ve written. I think Loreth Anne White was the last one - and now M.J. Ford is another. Fortunately this is only the second book in the series about D.S. Josie Masters, so I’ve only got one more to go back and read! With girls going missing from Oxford’s prestigious university colleges, Jo has to figure out the connection betw

Her Pretty Bones is the third in the DI Gina Harte series, and begins with an emaciated young woman falling from the back of a moving van. Too badly injured to live, she is only able to utter two words to the witness who finds her. “Save her” and with those two words, Gina knows that a clock is ticking on another young woman's life. Domestic slavery is a subject that's not explored much in fiction, with a lot of human slavery stories focusing on the sexual aspects of such cri

The second of a pair of books (the first one is Rattle) about a deranged serial killer who calls himself The Collector, this one picks up apparently right after the first leaves off. First thing I have to say is that I haven’t read Rattle, but I do think you can get away with reading this one as a standalone as everything is well covered without infodumping and Fiona Cummins does a fantastic job of deep-diving into character psyches. The Collector is obsessed with the physica

Five young women, all vanished on July 6 in consecutive years. All pretty, fitting the same physical description, and all engaged to be married. Now, for the first time, one of them has been found, gruesomely tortured and killed. For homicide lieutenant Jake Carrington the case brings up ugly memories of his long-lost sister, but he has to set aside personal feelings and find justice for these murdered brides before the killer strikes again. This is a police procedural with a

Arriving at a new posting in Canterbury, DI Edina ‘Ed’ Ogborne is thrust straight into the middle of a big case - a young woman has gone missing. It’s quickly apparent that the case bears similarities to a similar one from four years ago, and Ed must try to integrate with a new team which resent her arrival and try to solve the case before a tragedy occurs. The villain in The Taken Girls is an interesting character, one who experiences no sexual desire for his victims, just a

First in a new series featuring DC Beth Young, a female detective joining Cumbria’s FMIT (Force Major Incident Team) The Silent Dead follows Beth and her team in their race against time to catch a brutal and disturbed killer before he strikes again. Beth is an interesting character; a model in her teens, her passion for justice drove her to join the police, but she was still in her training period when an off-duty incident saw her left with deep facial scars, ‘ruining’ her be

Translated from the original Italian (beautifully, by the way, there was no hint of awkwardness or non-fluid English grammar) Blood In The Snow lost none of the lyrical quality which transports the reader to the small Italian skiing village high in the Alps where the story is set. Marzio Santoni was born in the mountains and after a stint as a top city detective, has returned to the quiet life. His calm, relaxed world is suddenly upended completely when four young female tour

A police procedural, Her Last Move follows a series of killings in London which appear, on the surface, to be unrelated. A witness to the first death, when DS Becca Vincent notices the first and second victims share a distinctive tattoo, she’s certain this will be the career break she needs to move up in her job. Working with ‘super-recogniser’ Joe Russell, she has to battle caring for her special-needs daughter with the demands of the toughest case of her career. The police

First in a new series about a female Detective Sergeant with the Major Crimes Unit in Stoke-on-Trent, a smallish city in the Midlands, Hush Hush follows Grace Allendale as she transfers from Manchester to Stoke, taking a promotion and returning to her roots. She’s thrown straight in at the deep end with a series of murders connected to the criminal Steele family - who just happen to be related to Grace a lot closer than she’d like. I’m still not sure why Grace wanted to go ba

Perfect Silence is the fourth book in the DI Callanach series, and full disclaimer; I haven’t read the other three. Luc Callanach is the hero of the title, a French former Interpol officer now working as a detective inspector on the Major Incident Team (MIT) in Edinburgh, Scotland. There are quite a few references to events happening to Luc, his boss Ava and other members of the MIT, but I didn’t find it was necessary to have read previous books to understand what was going o

Her Final Hour is the second in the DI Gina Harte series, but can easily be read as a standalone. I haven’t read the first and had no problems following along. Readers with triggers should be aware of the following (not unexpected in a murder thriller, but I include the warnings all the same); Rape, sexual abuse, marital abuse, physical abuse of a child, controlling relationship partner, torture, forced drugging, gaslighting, strangulation, burning of remains, Stepford Wife s

Kiss Of Death is Paul Finch’s seventh novel about the adventures of Mark ‘Heck’ Hecklenburg, a detective with the Serious Crimes Unit in London. I haven’t read any of the other books, but this one has definitely put Finch on my list as an author I’d like to read more of. The book stands perfectly well as a standalone, though there are references to cases solved and events occurring in earlier books in the series which make me keen to go back and read them. The story starts wi

In a quite near future Britain, a new party has risen to power on a platform of stopping crime. The Rules are simple; break the law in any way, you’re on a Rule One. Three strikes… and you’re out, sent to the newly-built ‘slaughterhouses’ and put to death in a revived capital punishment law. CSI Eddie Collins, reeling in the wake of personal tragedy, is just trying to get back to work and on with his life. Sent to examine the very car which took his son’s life in a hit-and-ru

On probation from her job after the takedown of a serial killer went bad, Detective Angie Pallorino turns her attention to the cold case which most haunts her… her own. Found in an ‘angel’s cradle’ as a wounded, mute four-year-old, the resurgence of buried memories sends her on a quest to dig into her own past and find out what happened to not just her, but the red-haired girl in a pink dress who haunts her dreams, waking and sleeping. With her lover James Maddocks still on t

Detective Angie Pallorino knows she’s not the easiest person in the world to deal with. She also knows she’d damn good at her job, in the sex crimes unit of Victoria, Canada’s city police force. The discovery of a mutilated, near-dead young woman in a graveyard bearing striking similarities to an old case sees Angie seconded to Homicide, where to her horror she has to work under the new boss, James Maddocks… a man with whom she had an anonymous sexual encounter just a couple

The Lying Kind is a police procedural thriller centred on the character of Rachel Prince, a late-thirty-something Detective Inspector assigned to review the case of Lola Jade Harper, a six-year-old girl abducted from her bed some months before and never seen since. Rachel is an intriguing and intelligent woman, but at times her personal choices made me want to grit my teeth. From her avoidance of discussing a situation many years in the past to her decision to avoid a promisi