The opening chapters in this book contained the best narrative of a house fire, from a civilian witness point of view, I have ever read.
Paige Northwood is a hearing British Sign Language interpreter. When she gets a video call from a client, who is frantically signing at her to phone the Fire Service, because his house is on fire and his wife is missing, she calls the brigade and runs around the corner to where the fire is taking place.
Paige works a Deaf Social worker Sasha, and helps her with clients. It’s one of these clients who’s house is on fire
Lucas is nowhere to be seen when Paige arrives, but is soon pulled out of the building by fire crews, he’s alive but as he sits on the back of an ambulance his wife is pulled out dead.
Hours later Lucas is charged with her murder. Sasha and Paige can’t believe he did it and start to carry out their own investigations.
What follows is amateur sleuthing at its best. Showing a real confirmation bias towards proving Lucas innocent they blunder their way along, and in Paige’s case, from one disaster to another, in a desperate attempt to find out who really killed Lucas wife.
As they start to uncover the truth about what Lucas is really like Paige starts to have doubts.
Running alongside the main story are short flashback chapters that cover the last few hours before the fire
The two main threads intertwine, just as the reader is led down one thread by Paige’s investigation, they are diverted by something that happened just hours before the fire.
This is a great story with great characters.
Pattison uses italics when one of the characters is signing, and somehow manages to get real emotion into the conversations.
Unlike many modern fiction books where murder follows murder she has kept it real with the one main crime, but of course there are a lot of less serious crimes orbiting it. People just don’t get murdered for no reason, most of the time.
I’ve said before how I love a book that gets me researching, and this one did just that. How many of us have given any thought to how deaf people use mobile phones, apart from texting and using the internet.
I got the sneaky feeling that this wasn’t the first book in the series when I was reading it, but I waited till the end to check. It’s book 3 in the Paige Northwood series.
I have to say it reads great as a standalone, but I’m definitely going back to read the first two.
I loved this book for the stubborn, yet naive, way Paige got involved. It was almost like going back to my childhood reading when The Hardy Brothers stumbled across some injustice they wanted to right.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a very grown up book that deals with real emotions in a modern world, there’s even a touch of romance, and do you know what, I enjoyed it.
Pages: 400. Publisher: Avon. Publishing date: April 29th 2021
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