‘Black Notice’ by Joy Ellis

Published by Joffe Books,
15 September 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-80573341-6 (PB)

Six am in the morning and retired police officer Bob Ruston is confronted on his doorstep by a man with blood on his face and a handcuff dangling from his lacerated wrist, saying ‘Please let me in, they’re going to kill me.’ Conscious of his wife and disabled son in the house, Bob dials 999. But the lad scuttles off.

This is the 11^th book in the series featuring DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans. Both have experienced the loss of a partner and have reached a kind of acceptance. Their morning is interrupted by a request from Anna Millard to speak with Marie.  Her husband Johnny Millard has served seven years of a ten-year sentence, and five days ago was released on parole. And yesterday he went missing. I want you to help me find my husband, said Anna. Marie recalled he was an astute villain and found it easy to manipulate the transfer of money.  Anna is convinced he was set up because he discovered something he shouldn’t and someone decided to shut him up, by revealing his hacking, fraud and identity theft. Marie and Jackman decide to look into it with DC Robbie Melton, who was proving to be a very good detective.

Enter Lucas, who has concocted a plan to rob a house owned by two brothers that contains the stuff that dreams are made of. Entering the property to have a look round, Lucas saw that the décor was pure Art Deco. It was way beyond all his expectations.  And his carefully formulated plan should run like clockwork since he had found the genius hacker Chaos, who despite the house’s state of the art security can easily control it.

Every couple of months Bryson Smith liked to spend at least a week in the Fens with his parents who had scraped together the money to send him to university to get a degree in fine art. Today he is attacking the garden for them.  Particularly the area at the bottom which is incredibly overgrown, and with the arrival of Colin, old Gabriel Reynold’s grandson, they make terrific headway surprisingly discovering an old-World War Two air raid shelter. Sweating from exertion they could now see its shape. Let’s have a look inside, said Colin. As they expected it was full of rubbish, but as they looked closer, they could see tangled limbs, and a skeletal hand reached up. Bryson gasped, there’s someone dead in there. We need the police.

Marie and Jackman hasten to the scene. What they thought was a hoax, was clearly not. The tangle of contorted and twisted limbs showed that there was clearly more than one body in there.

I have read many books by Joy Ellis, and they are all fascinating mysteries. But this one exceeds all those that have gone before.  So where do I start….

Is Johnny Millard dead?

Will Lucas get away with the steal of the century?

Who is the man with the lacerated arm?

Just how many dead bodies are there in the World War Two air raid shelter? Who are they and who murdered them?

Full of twists and turns, this is a gripping, heart in the mouth, edge of your seat thriller. Most highly recommended.  Keep them coming Joy.
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Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett

Joy Ellis was born in Kent but spent most of her working life in London and Surrey. She was an apprentice florist to Constance Spry Ltd, a prestigious Mayfair shop that throughout the Sixties and Seventies teemed with both royalty and ‘real’ celebrities. She swore that one day she would have a shop of her own. It took until the early Eighties, but she did it. Sadly the recession wiped it out, and she embarked on a series of weird and wonderful jobs; the last one being a bookshop manager Joy now lives in a village in the Lincolnshire Fens with her partner, Jacqueline. She had been writing mysteries for years but never had the time to take it seriously. Now as her partner is a highly decorated retired police officer; her choice of genre was suddenly clear. She has set her crime thrillers in the misty fens.   

www.joyellis.info