Let The Dead Speak
By Jane Casey
Blurb
When an 18-year-old girl returns home to find her house covered in blood and her mother missing, Detective Maeve Kerrigan and the murder squad must navigate a web of lies to discover the truth… When eighteen-year-old Chloe Emery returns to her West London home she finds Kate, her mother, missing and the house covered in blood. There may not be a body, but everything else points to murder. Maeve Kerrigan is young, ambitious and determined to prove she’s up to her new role as detective sergeant. In the absence of a body, she and maverick detective Josh Derwent turn their attention to the neighbours. The ultra-religious Norrises are acting suspiciously; their teenage daughter definitely has something to hide. Then there’s William Turner, once accused of stabbing a schoolmate and the neighbourhood’s favourite criminal. Is he merely a scapegoat or is there more behind the charismatic façade? As the accusations fly, Maeve must piece together a patchwork of conflicting testimonies, none of which quite add up. Who is lying, who is not? The answer could lead them to the truth about Kate Emery, and save the life of someone else.
Our Review
This book sounded good from the blurb and it contained some good twists but it was so-so at best. However, saying that I have read a lot of good crime books recently and that might have influenced how I feel about this book.
Also, I predicted quite a lot of the major twists but not all of them.
Kate Emery and her 18 year old daughter live together in a nice house in Putney. Chloe fled home early after an incident at her dads which she won’t talk about with anyone, not even the police.
When she returns to the house it is covered in blood and her mother is gone.
“It had been raining for fifty-six hours when Chloe Emery came home. The forecast had said to expect a heatwave, it wasn’t supposed to be raining.
And Chloe wasn’t supposed to be home.”
Chloe lets herself in her house and doesn’t initially understand what she is seeing.
“There was a mark on the wall. A big one. A smear, with four lines running through it like tracks. Chloe’s eyes tracked from the smear to the ground, to the droplets that ran down the well and trickled over the skirting board and puddled on the ground. It was dark, whatever it was…Dirty.”
There are a lot of suspects. Mr Norris is Kate’s next door neighbour, an avid churchgoer and a thoroughly creepy man and his mousy wife Eleanor, Local bad boy William Turner, Chloe’s best friend Bethany and even Chloe herself.
Newly Promoted Maeve Kerrigan is one of the people investigating the homicide. The saving grace of this book for me was the relationship between Maeve and Derwent.
“My first impression of 27 Valerian Road was that it was the kind of house I’d always wanted to own. It was a classic Victorian terraced house inside as well as out, long and dark and narrow, with coloured encaustic tiles on the hall floor and stained glass in the front door. I could have done without the blood streaks that skated down the hall, swirled on the walls, splotched the stairs.”
As the investigation proceeds a lot of neighbourhood secrets come to light but will any of them lead to the killer?
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 169 Times.
I hope you enjoyed this book review, please consider sharing it with others.
Get In Touch
Please feel free to leave a comment to this book review below. Or even leave your own review if you like.
If you run a blog and/or have posted a review to this book, a Q & A or general author interview online you can always add a trackback to it here and following moderation we'll add a link to it below.