My Rating:

4.5

Favorite Quotes:

 

Aware of her inability to leave him be, she nevertheless couldn’t help herself, so that sometimes she thought she spent all her time watching out for him, not so that she could avoid him, but so she could give him grief. Sometimes when she looked at Jude, with his cool determination to stay civil, she realised she didn’t like herself very much, that there was a bitterness within her heart that surfaced only when she was with him. Three years after they’d split, she should have been over it.

 

She preferred someone a little less tempestuous and with a slightly sweeter nature, though experience and the wreckage of her marriage had taught her circumspection. Scott, her estranged husband, was living proof that sweetness and calm didn’t preclude a man being a two-timing bastard.

 

Laurie might, if called upon, prove a match for a baton-wielding thug or two, but it was evident that he had no weapons sufficient to repel a woman in her fifties who didn’t understand the meaning of the word no.

 

Clever, compassionate and mostly silent, his best friend was a bunch of contradictions. A vegetarian, teetotal, chain-smoking gay churchgoer, he was the model of common sense, the man who showed the importance of balance and sometimes, he felt, kept him sane.

 

… still staring out at the tiny garden in the house he’d bought just to be free of all his memories of her. But it didn’t work like that. Memories weren’t something you packed into boxes, unpacked when you were ready, or sorted into piles for keeping or reusing or recycling, or simply throwing away. They clung to you with the tenacity of the devil, and ambushed you when you least expected them to.

 

My Review:

 

Jo Allen’s clever debut was a well-crafted and slow-building tale of abduction, arson, and murder. The narrative was loaded with insightfully keen observations of human nature at both ends of the ethical and moral spectrum, as such, we were privy to the light and dark sides of Ms. Allen’s flawed, oddly compelling, and complex characters. As a new transfer to the team, Detective Sergeant Ashleigh was forced to hit the ground running and she quickly proved herself to be not only up for the task but a major asset, despite her uncanny tendency to annoy her new boss while doing so.   The case was complicated and compounded by difficult personalities on both sides of the law, and I found the characters’ backstories to be as compelling as the current case they were working. I am chomping at the bit to start the next in the series, Death At Eden’s End, which is already locked and loaded on my beloved Kindle.