My enjoyment of this book suffered for a couple of factors. It was only available in audio from my library. I'm still relatively new to audio and sometimes found details of this convoluted mystery were getting muddled in my mind. The recording was made from a CD version, announced whenever the end of a disc was reached and annoyingly, the progress scale didn't match up with actual chapters. Secondly, there were some long breaks between my listening sessions, giving me time to lose the thread of what's going on. And there's a lot going on.
We meet DC Lacey Flint as she accidentally becomes part of her first murder investigation when the not quite dead victim slumps onto her car. Flint has been trying to stay on the down low at work, for reasons we don't learn until much later, and is dismayed to be plunked in the middle of things and coming to the attention of senior officers DI Dana Tulloch and Mark Joesbury. More murders happen and Flint continues to be the epicentre of events.
As a youngster, Flint was fascinated by the Jack the Ripper murders and is the first to see the linkages between those crimes and the current ones. (I was annoyed about some of the Ripper “facts" until I checked publication dates and realized this was published before Hallie Rubenfeld's The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.) Flint becomes integral to the investigation and finds herself increasingly under the eye of Joesbury. She tries to deflect his attention by admitting to a past of homelessness and drug use, but insists that is all in the past. She is aware that Joesbury remains suspicious of her story and why the murderer seems focused on her, but believes that her only solution is running away (completely in character for someone with a precarious background).
Bolton deals out the bread crumbs gradually, letting the reader assimilate a new fact and adjust their view of the situation. Then she hits with another item, expanding our view again. She is a very effective tease. The ending was still a complete surprise to me, despite all those hints, but I love being surprised. Since Lacey has been seriously considering fleeing for the whole book, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that her future on the police force is questionable by book's end. As is her relationship with Joesbury.
Thankfully, the library has volume two in paper, as I am sure this one would have been a solid 4 stars if I had a dead-tree version instead of the audio.
No comments:
Post a Comment