Detective Hanlon is the kind of person who would have been incredible as a sheriff in a Wild West town. Unfortunately, her style of policing really isn’t suitable for a modern cop in the Met, and her methods have landed her in trouble with the higher-ups. On mandatory leave, she heads for the remote Western Isles of Scotland to try and get her head together… and finds herself neck-deep in trouble without even trying.
As Hanlon investigates, she finds evidence of money laundering, drug dealing, at least one police officer mixed up in things up to their neck… and a mounting body count. Constitutionally incapable of walking away, Hanlon is determined to find the killer, but the killer might have found her first!
It wasn’t until late in the book that I finally figured out what was going on, despite the author leaving a decent trail of breadcrumbs. Almost the entire book is told from Hanlon’s PoV, with just a couple of chapters here and there in others, and to be honest I think those could have been dispensed with as they were mainly used to give the impressions other characters had of Hanlon, and we just didn’t need it. We’re in Hanlon’s mind, we know her heart. We don’t need to know that certain characters find her attractive, or intimidating, or both.
I liked Hanlon and her no-nonsense approach, I liked the beautiful setting on the remote Scottish island of Jura and the other characters introduced, and I thought the plot was intriguing. Nevertheless, I can’t quite give this five stars because of the issues I had with the unnecessary PoV switches; a good editor should have told the author to cut those and stay with Hanlon, a reliable narrator if ever there was one. Four stars for a solid story which just needed a few more tweaks.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley and Rachel's Random Resources.