The Blurb:
Detective Chief Inspector Ryan retreats to Holy Island seeking sanctuary when he is forced to take sabbatical leave from his duties as a homicide detective. A few days before Christmas, his peace is shattered and he is thrust back into the murky world of murder when a young woman is found dead amongst the ancient ruins of the nearby Priory.
When former local girl Dr Anna Taylor arrives back on the island as a police consultant, old memories swim to the surface making her confront her difficult past. She and Ryan struggle to work together to hunt a killer who hides in plain sight, while pagan ritual and small-town politics muddy the waters of their investigation.
Murder and mystery are peppered with a sprinkling of romance and humour in this fast-paced crime whodunnit set on the spectacular Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne, cut off from the English mainland by a tidal causeway.
My thoughts:
I listened to the audiobook of this, and for some reason, I had it in my head that Lindisfarne was off the coast of Scotland, and I got confused when the narrator voiced the residents with a Newcastle accent. A quick google soon corrected my terrible geography, and I was able to start enjoying the book. It’s billed as a romantic suspense, but the romance definitely took a back seat to the mystery, which was an intriguing police procedural set on a small island with an equally small population. The bodies soon start piling up, as do the suspects, with plenty of clues for readers to unravel along with DCI Ryan and his team.
There’s a LOT of head-hopping in this book, and I found all the sudden point-of-view changes a bit jarring at first, but I got used to it after a while. I loved all the forensic and technical details of the investigation, and although the identity of the culprit was both, uh—how do I put this?—obvious in the broader sense but difficult to pinpoint, there were a couple of fun twists at the end. Ryan, the main character, was enough of a renegade to draw me in, and I look forward to reading more about him in the future.
Leave a Reply