Usual lead character DCI Craig Gillard takes a bit of a back seat in this book.
That’s because the story revolves more around the people that are involved in a crime from the civilian side.
A local head master is found beheaded in his car.
Who would target a man that is held in fairly high regard by most, but then we find out about the real man, and it seems there could be a few people who would be happy to see him dead.
Then there’s a Barrister who is really down on her luck, financially she is skint, her personal and professional life is stuck in a rut.
When she finds a young runaway living in her garden she finds that strangely the girl knows way too much about her life.
Dizzy, the runaway, has a terrible history, running away from home at 13, abused, by her “boyfriend” who got her addicted to drugs and then forced her into prostitution, working for one of the worst gang bosses in the country, she has escaped and is on the run in fear of her life.
So why chose Barrister Julia McGann’s garden to sleep in, and how does she know so much about her.
Gillard’s team are investigating the death of the headless headmaster, now that would have been a great title for a book. The more they dig into his life the more sleazy it looks.
The various affairs, the reluctant cuckold wife, the aggrieved students, the list of potential suspects seems endless, but the one woman they think most likely is proving impossible to identify.
This is one of those stories that had to be written from outside of the police prospective. It had to be written with Julia McGann as the main character. It is better for showing issues the police could not know about.
It’s a book about choices and the way one choice becomes the first strand of a spiders web, which when complete is a really complex structure.
That’s what this story is, a complex spiders web, and it’s brilliant.
Pages: 352 Publisher: Canelo. Available now
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