Nick Louth
When one of your favourite authors ends a great series, and you wonder what they are going to come up with next, this is the type of response you really want.
Detective Inspector Jan Talantire and her team work in a Major Investigation Team of Devon and Cornwall Police. What they face in this story is a unique and baffling crime.
Ruth Lyle was a 16 year old girl when she was killed on the alter of a church 50 years ago.
When a woman is killed in the same way, in the now converted church, on the anniversary it is the start of an investigation that will span half a century.
It’s not just the location and manner of death which are identical. The woman killed today has the same name as the original victim, the same date of birth, and her birth certificate.
As far as debuts for a new series goes this is second to none.
The crime is clever and left me intrigued up till the very last page.
Talentire is a great character. Nearly 40, newly single and struggling with trying to establish a life balance that would actually give her a chance on the dating scene.
She is driven as a detective, and doesn’t take any heed of pressures from above, or below, when she is on the right track.
The supporting characters of her team, especially the newly appointed digital expert Primrose, are going to be great to watch develop over the series.
But what really steals the show is the setting. Small town crime on the North Devon coast needs all the skills of those investigated in the big cities. Without overlapping CCTV, with sketchy mobile phone coverage, and with the infrastructure difficulties of rural policing, it is more old school than some of the stories set in the cities, and for me that makes it all the more readable.
Let’s hope this is the start of another brilliant series.
Publisher: Canelo Crime. Pages: 326. Publishing date: 2nd May 2024 Audiobook 10 hours 9 minutes narrated by Mandy Weston
nigeladamsbookworm 