Published by Quercus Publishing Ltd,
24 September 2016.
ISBN: 978 1 7842 9140(PB)
24 September 2016.
ISBN: 978 1 7842 9140(PB)
This is the third in this series featuring Detective
Alice Madison of the Seattle Police Homicide Unit. Madison herself had a deeply
troubled childhood; this has fed through into her adult life; her personality
is angry and she reacts with fury to any attempt to bully but beneath all that
is a visceral sadness. Her current lover, childhood friend Aaron Lever, is kind
and understanding but even so cannot reach through to those inner depths. She
does also have an essential integrity which commits to the pursuit of criminals
and the upholding of justice. But that has got her into trouble with some of
those in authority, namely, agents of the Los Angeles Drug Enforcement Agency:
some years ago, when John Cameron, good friend of Madison’s previous lover, the
lawyer Nathan Quinn, was in danger of being killed by members of a drug cartel
she had shot and killed one of those threatening them. Now the agents inform
her that Cameron has been acting a self-appointed executioner of the other
members of the cartel; Madison had saved the life of a serial killer. When her
relationship with Quinn is also held against her, she retorts that Quinn may
have once been a ferocious defence lawyer, but he is now Senior Counsel to the
U.S Attorney of the Western District of Washington State. Not a lot the DEA
agents can say to that!
In
any case Madison has too much currently on her plate: the brutal murder of
Matthew Duncan, in a peaceful suburb of Seattle, while his wife Kate is out on
a run. Madison is in charge of the case along with her colleagues, middle-aged,
dependable Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown and Crime Scene Investigator Amy
Sorensen. At first, it seems to be a murder committed by an opportunistic
burglar and a ring stolen from the house and pawned provides the evidence
against a local man. But then Amy finds other evidence which is worrying: a
solitary hair which can be linked to a similar murder seven years before. A man
had been convicted for that murder but had committed suicide two years ago. So he
couldn’t be responsible for the murder of Matthew Duncan. And it appears that
someone has been watching not just the Duncan house but the house which was the
scene of the earlier murder. A meticulous search through records brings to
light a number of very similar murders; in all cases there have been
convictions but is this all just coincidence or are numbers of innocent people
in prison for something they didn’t do?
Meanwhile
Cameron is moving through the landscape intent on administering his own form of
justice, and Madison’s relationship with Quinn is beginning to re-emerge. And
someone is watching Kate Duncan.
All
this makes for a highly complicated not to say convoluted plot which
nonetheless is grippingly told with interesting and complex characters.
Recommended.
------
Reviewer: Radmila
May
Earlier
titles in the Alice Madison series: The
Gift of Darkness, The Dark.
http://www.valentinagiambanco.com/
Radmila May was
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional
work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of
her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published
late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal
flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a
third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology –
and is now concentrating on her own writing.
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