Author: Caz Frear
Publication Date: August 14, 2018
Publisher: Harper
In this gripping debut procedural, a young London
policewoman must probe dark secrets buried deep in her own family’s past to
solve a murder and a long-ago disappearance.
Your father is a liar. But is he a killer?
Even liars tell the truth . . . sometimes.
Twenty-six-year-old Cat Kinsella overcame a
troubled childhood to become a Detective Constable with the Metropolitan Police
Force, but she’s never been able to banish these ghosts. When she’s called to
the scene of a murder in Islington, not far from the pub her estranged father
still runs, she discovers that Alice Lapaine, a young housewife who didn’t get
out much, has been found strangled.
Cat and her team immediately suspect Alice’s
husband, until she receives a mysterious phone call that links the victim to
Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland eighteen years
earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat—her family met Maryanne while
on holiday, right before she vanished. Though she was only a child, Cat knew
that her charming but dissolute father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied
knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance. Did her father do
something to the teenage girl all those years ago? Could he have harmed Alice
now? And how can you trust a liar even if he might be telling the truth?
Determined to close the two cases, Cat rushes
headlong into the investigation, crossing ethical lines and trampling
professional codes. But in looking into the past, she might not like what she
finds. . . .
Cat Kinsella is one of the best leading
protagonists that I have read this year. She is snarky, extremely witty, flawed
(and knows it), and deals with her problems openly and honestly. What more
could you ask for? I would not have wanted anyone else to tell me this story.
Cat works for the London Metropolitan Police and is running from her past and
her family, who she feels is concealing some murderous secrets.
The story starts off by providing some background
details about Cat and her family’s previous life. Not long after the first
chapter or so, Cat is brought in on a new murder case and it quickly becomes
personal for her. She is such a strong female lead – a police detective is the
perfect job for her. We learn bits and pieces about Cat as the story progresses
– I felt that she, her family, and the victim were fully fleshed out
characters.
The writing in this novel was so spot on – I constantly
felt as if I were inside a police station. I learned so much lingo and technical
terms; it was great! Frear, the author, must have put in a lot of time learning
police procedures, interactions with suspects, etc. With that being said, this
author is from England, so some of the slang used was hard for me to follow at
first, but I got used to it and caught on very quickly.
The story goes back and forth between past and
present – all narrated by Cat. Cat faces a lot of personal and professional
conflict, both are written superbly and realistically. My only complaint with
this novel is that at times the writing seemed to dredge on and the plot was
slow developing. However, once the suspense showed up, everything went into
full swing!
Problem is, while the lie may be sweet as it falls
from your lips, the feeling in your gut is always putridly sour.
You
had a sixty-five percent chance of fathering a child with your wife. There’s a
sixty-three percent chance that you killer her.
The most devastating punishments aren’t always the
legal ones.
***A free copy of this book was provided to me by
the publishers at Harper in exchange for my honest review***
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