Review by Bill Kirton
If you
want to know how to write an opening which draws the reader in, check out the
first chapter of Missing Believed Dead.
Be warned, though – you’ll want to read on and on.
This is the third in Chris
Longmuir’s Dundee series featuring D.S. Bill
Murphy, whose personal life is still something of a mess but who cares a lot about
the victims, potential victims and collateral damage of the crimes he
investigates. The arrival of a new D.I., Kate Rawlings, who’s unimpressed by
his apparent sloppiness, adds to the pressures on him. Most of all, though, the
focus is on the family of Jade, a 13 year old girl who disappeared five years
before, the victim of an online predator. But there have been other, more
recent murders and Murphy suspects they’re somehow linked with the family, too.
With her
usual fascination for the darker recesses of people’s psyches, the author shows
us the separate torments of Jade’s mother, sister and brother, each of whom is
scarred by her loss. And all the time, in the background, there’s the mystery
of another abducted teenager for whom the clock is ticking inexorably towards what
threatens to be a painful, fatal outcome. Altogether, it’s a dark, scary
picture of an apparently ordinary world of ordinary people whose actions and
motives betray the demons within them.
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