This edition Published 18th May 2023 by Pan Macmillan.
From the cover of the book:
When a young girl is found dead at the base of Hadrian’s Wall, it’s not long before Detective Chief Inspector Kate Daniels realizes that her death was no ordinary homicide. She was thrown from a great height – and was probably alive before she hit the ground.When a local businessman reports his daughter missing, has Daniels found the identity of the victim, or is a killer playing a sickening game?
As the murder investigation team delves deeper into the case, half-truths are told and secrets exposed. And while Daniels makes her way through a mountain of obstacles, time is running out for one terrified girl . . .
Settled Blood is Mari Hannah’s second gripping crime novel featuring DCI Kate Daniels.
***********
When the body of a girl is found in the wilds near Hadrian's Wall, the police are baffled about how it came to be there, because of the complete lack of scene-of-crime evidence. DCI Kate Daniels is called in as SIO and is horrified to discover that the catastrophic injuries the victim received came as the result of being dropped from a great height - and that she was probably alive when she hit the ground.
The case gets rapidly more complicated when a wealthy businessman discloses his daughter has gone missing. Rather than giving the investigation direction, Daniels and her team suddenly become embroiled in reports of disappearing Durham University students bearing a striking resemblance to the victim. This is an investigation that centres on a complex web of secrets and lies, and as the police wade through them all to get to the truth, it becomes clear that somewhere out there is a girl whose life hangs in the balance. Can they find her before time runs out?
Settled Blood is the second book in the DCI Kate Daniels series. It starts with a terrifying bang at a famous beauty spot, and burgeons into a twisty case that brings with it a bevy of red herrings and blind alleys before Daniels and her team can understand what lies behind a shockingly bizarre murder.
Hannah does a fine job of leading you down the garden path multiple times in this story, with cases that cross over each other around missing girls, mistaken identity, prostitution, and the desperate acts of a broken mind out for vengeance. The clues come from oodles of solid police procedural content, which keeps you compulsively turning the pages as the plot flips between tense, slow-burn elements, and pacy action scenes, all the way to the heart-in-your-mouth finale.
There are some meaty themes running through this second book that delve nicely into difficult family relationships, loyalty, secrets, and twisted notions of guilt, and alongside the highly addictive investigative shenanigans Hannah treats you to compelling storylines that build on what we learned about Daniels' personal life and the colleagues that make up her team in the first book, The Murder Wall, too.
I thoroughly enjoyed my second adventure with DCI Kate Daniels, and am really looking forward to more in book three, Deadly Deceit.
Settled Blood is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to Pan Macmillan for allowing me access to an ecopy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Compulsive Readers for inviting me to be part of #TeamDaniels.In July 2010, she won a Northern Writers' Award for Settled Blood. In 2013, she won the Polari First Book Prize for her debut, The Murder Wall. She was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library 2017 as the author of the most enjoyed collection of work in libraries. In 2019, she was awarded DIVA Wordsmith of the Year. In that same year, Mari was Programming Chair of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Festival. In 2020, Mari was named as DIVA 'Wordsmith of the Year' and won Capital Crime's 'Crime Book of the Year' award.
She lives in Northumberland with her partner, a former murder detective.
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment