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Saturday 17 February 2018

‘Wrong Place’ by Michelle Davies




Published by Pan Books,
5 October 2017. 
ISBN 978-1-4472-8422-2 (PB).


DC Maggie Neville is the Family Liaison Officer in two cases.  They are not apparently connected - except that each occurred within the victim’s own home, one is an assault on an old lady and the other involves a wife whose husband has attacked her with a knife and then tried to kill himself.   Maggie finds handling these two cases takes a great deal of strength particularly when she has various problems in her private life.  Her ability to get difficult and emotional subjects to talk to her enables her to advance the investigations.   There have been other such attacks on elderly ladies by two robbers but does this fit into that pattern?  The wife’s situation as her husband struggles to survive the effects of the drugs he has taken is emotionally fraught.


Maggie finds both the cases difficult to fathom and she digs into their backgrounds.  She discovers  how distant events may have produced current crimes.  The transitions from one victim’s story to the other’s are very well achieved and the tensions build to a thrilling climax.  The central and peripheral characters grab your attention and twists and turns of events hold your full attention.   The ending does not disappoint though there are one or two looses ends deliberately left dangling in readiness for the next adventure!

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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

The first thriller about Maggie was Gone Astray while the next one, False Witness is previewed at the end of Wrong Place.



Michelle Davies was born in Middlesex in 1972, raised in Buckinghamshire and now lives in north London. Her debut crime novel, Gone Astray, was published in Hardback in March 2016 and features Family Liaison Officer DC Maggie Neville as its central police character. This was followed in October 2017 by Wrong Place, also featuring DC Neville.  Michelle has been writing professionally for 20 years as a journalist on magazines, including on the production desk at ELLE, and as Features Editor of heat. Her last staff position before going freelance was Editor-at-Large at Grazia magazine and she currently writes for a number of women’s magazines and newspaper supplements. Michelle is also crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Express’s Books section. She began her career straight from school at 18, working as a trainee reporter on her home-town newspaper, the Bucks Free Press.

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.





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