Avon Publishing-Released January 2018

Based in Edinburgh, D.C.I. Ava Turner is newly promoted and as such has a lot to prove. A young girl is found dead in a local beauty spot & the police are perplexed as to how she came to be there, another death occurs soon after and there are some disturbing similarities.

Turner works with D.I. Luc Callanach & the rest of her team to try to understand what makes this killer tick but time is not on their side & they face an almost Herculean task in order to prevent more possible deaths.

There are a couple of sub-plots, which are as equally thrilling but one, involving the criminal underworld in Glasgow, I had a small niggle with. As a teacher (read perfectionist) I will always focus on the one negative thing in lesson observation feedback. It doesn’t matter that there might be a million good points. So I hate criticising anyone’s writing because I know it is a labour of love & this could just be my perception of it but…I think the ‘villains’ in this section could have been portrayed as younger men. For me it was a bit stereotypical of old style gangsters with their names, traits & weapons even. I understand that they were supposed to have been around for a long time, old school etc but I felt they were too old school & didn’t fit with the age/generation of the rest of the characters in that way. Like I said, a small, personal thing & who cares what I think right? It doesn’t detract from a compelling read!

This is a macabre story made worse, because it could actually happen. There have been two previous novels in the series which I haven’t read and so it would seem that both the main characters have a history & baggage which they bring into this story. I don’t think you need to have read the previous books in order to get a firm hand on the story but I think I will do now because I enjoyed this one so much!

Fields has written a pacy, engaging thriller with a carefully & cleverly constructed plot- I am looking forward to reading the next one! 4/5🌟