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Release date: May 13, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Synopsis:

Her stomach lurches as she sits in the windowless room. He throws her phone to the ground, grinds it against the floor with the heel of his shoe and brings his face closer to hers. There was no turning back now, her life as she knew it was gone.

When the lifeless body of a man is found on an industrial estate, Detective Kim Stone arrives on the scene and discovers he’s been tortured in the worst way imaginable.

But as she breaks the devastating news to the victim’s wife, Diane Phipps, Kim can’t help feeling that something isn’t quite right about the woman’s reaction.

Twenty-four hours later, the victim’s family disappears into thin air.

Then a second body is found staked to the ground in a local nature reserve.

Desperate to crack the case open quickly, Kim and her team unravel a vital clue – a fiercely guarded secret that links both victims and could cost even more lives.

A secret that some police officers are also protecting.

Faced with deceit from those she should be able to trust, family members who won’t talk, and local reporter, Tracy Frost, opening a can of worms on the case of a woman murdered by her husband a year ago – Kim is in deep water like never before.

Kim must find the motive if she is to find the killer who is systematically targeting and torturing his victims. But can she unlock the shocking truth and stop him before he strikes again?

Review:

You know those books that are all consuming type of reads, the ones where when something or someone from your real life interrupts you it takes a second for you to renter the real world and leave the fictional one behind? That was this sort of book for me, I am so attached to the world of Kim Stone and company that once I started this one I was truly absorbed and had a difficult time switching my mind off when I had to set it down. I found myself making dinner or folding laundry and thinking about the case the team was trying to solve. So I guess you could say this one got in my head and under my skin!

Marsons raised the stakes here, this is one of her darker, grittier and more disturbing books in the series and is a contender for one of my favorites. As always there was a fresh and intriguing new angle here, I swear the plot lines in this series just keep getting better and more fascinating and once again, I learned something new. So you have a tense and exciting plot and then as always you have the characters themselves, and just when I think they’ve been developed just about as far as they can be there’s another layer to them that gets peeled back revealing something new. Kim’s old nemesis Tracy Frost plays a large role here, mostly as a subplot and the repartee between these two cracks me up. Surprisingly I loved learning more about Frost and her personal life as well and will be interested to see what kind of role she will have in future books. The case was wrapped up in the end but the ending left me desperate for the next book, sort of a mini cliffhanger. Once again highly recommended by me, this series never lets me down and is always a guaranteed five star, heart pounding, twisty, intense must read.

Overall rating: 5/5

Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.