‘The Silent Places’ by Sarah Mellor

Published by HarperNorth,
26 March 2026.
ISBN: 978-0-00871625-7 (HB)

The Silent Places is the second in Sarah Mellor’s gritty Liverpool-based series featuring the flawed but lovable DS Leigh Borrowdale and her long-suffering Chinese partner and colleague, DI Des Chung. Like The Departed, Mellor’s debut novel, The Silent Places displays the authenticity we can expect from a Scouser despite Liverpool’s being Mellor’s adopted home. Both publications are not only crime fiction novels but also well-researched historical depictions of a city the author has lived in for thirty years and knows intimately, with the first set in the Winter of Discontent in 1979 and the second framed by the Toxteth riots of 1981. 

In The Silent Places, the troubled Leigh has become a mother. Naturally, Des Chung is adorable little Kai’s father, but the couple is estranged because of Leigh’s predilection for casual sex with strangers and tendency to get blindingly drunk whenever opportunity allows. Kai offers comfort as an undemanding child who seems to view his mother’s excesses with the wisdom and compassion of a baby Buddha. 

The novel opens on a note of tension and suspense that the author skillfully maintains throughout. Duane Harding, the man Leigh suspects of killing Gail, his nine-year-old stepdaughter, and of hiding her body, has just been acquitted of those crimes. The jury’s verdict devastates the heavily pregnant Leigh, who has spent months trying to uncover evidence of his guilt, mindful, too, of her promise to Nikki, Gail’s distraught mother, to find her daughter. 

The loss of a loved one: it’s a grief Leigh is only too familiar with herself. James, her younger brother, disappeared seven years earlier on a camping trip to the Isle of Man, and Leigh still misses him terribly, imagining she sees him whenever she visits their childhood home, where her mother still lives. Then Duane himself is found murdered in his kitchen, his new wife kneeling by his body, and Leigh and Des are tasked with finding his killer.  

This is a novel of unexpected twists and turns, but they are never unearned. The more we learn about the cast of people inhabiting the story, the more likely and even inevitable their actions appear. One of the author’s many strengths is making her characters not only believable but also making us, her readers, care about them. Perhaps it is because Mellor worked as a psychotherapist for the NHS for many years that she can produce fully-fleshed out individuals whose mannerisms can amuse as well as irritate, who are inconsistent but charming, capable of heroism as well as selfishness. Highly recommended!
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Sarah Mellor is a crime author and psychological therapist based in Liverpool. She has been writing – and dreaming of being a writer - for as long as she can remember. She loves crime novels, particularly stories with lots of twists and turns, and this was her aim when starting her series of 1970s-set books featuring Detective Leigh Borrowdale and her partner, Des Chung. Her first novel, The Departed, was set in the snowy landscape of the winter of 1979. The second book in the series, The Silent Places, is set in riot-torn Liverpool in 1981 and will be published on 26 March 2026.

You can follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahjeanmellor 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising four murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.   

Lea O'Harra – Mystery writer