Today is my stop on the blog tour for Perfect Crime by Helen Fields. I have a review for you today and if you like the sound of it, you can click here to order yourself a copy. Don't forget to check out the other blogs on the tour for more exclusive content, extracts and reviews.
Here's what it's all about:
Your darkest moment is your most vulnerable…
Stephen Berry is about to jump off a bridge until a suicide prevention counsellor stops him. A week later, Stephen is dead. Found at the bottom of a cliff, DI Luc Callanach and DCI Ava Turner are drafted in to investigate whether he jumped or whether he was pushed…
As they dig deeper, more would-be suicides roll in: a woman found dead in a bath; a man violently electrocuted. But these are carefully curated deaths – nothing like the impulsive suicide attempts they’ve been made out to be.
Little do Callanach and Turner know how close their perpetrator is as, across Edinburgh, a violent and psychopathic killer gains more confidence with every life he takes…
An unstoppable crime thriller from the #1 bestseller. The perfect read for fans of Karin Slaughter and M. J. Arlidge.
Review: This is the fifth in a series of crime novels written by Helen Fields featuring Detective Inspector Luc Callanach, seconded from Interpol in France to Police Scotland's Major Investigation Team in Edinburgh. If you haven't read any of the previous series, this latest entry can be read as a standalone thriller. In this book, we get to know a little more about Callanach's past history, which is integral to the plot.
A series of apparent suicides has occurred in Edinburgh that, on further investigation by Detective Inspector Callanach and his superior Detective Chief Inspector Ava Turner, are not as they seem at first sight and may, in fact, be meticulously plotted murders. As the body count mounts up there is a race against time to track down the perpetrator. The tension is maintained throughout the book and I found myself wanting to keep reading to find out what happened next.
I read the previous book in the series, and it was good to re-visit familiar characters in the Major Investigation Team and to see how they had moved on. As well as the investigation work, we get an insight into the private lives of some of the characters.
A couple of small criticisms I had of the book is that, as in most works of crime fiction, the distinction between forensic pathologist and other forensic disciplines was blurred, with the pathologist in this book also appearing to be a fingerprint expert. Again, as in most crime fiction, clear cut scientific results are obtained from some very intractable materials, which would not be the case in real world forensic work. I also found, for a story set in Edinburgh, that the dialogue featured very few Scottish colloquialisms.
However, these are minor criticisms, and I found the book to be a thrilling, although at times very graphic, account of a major police investigation into a series of crimes.
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