I think I should have started this series from the beginning ...

Blurb:
Criminal defence lawyer Helena Flemming has fallen out of love with John Eisenmenger.

Devastated, Eisemenger finds solace and distraction by reluctantly return to his life a a forensic pathologist.

His first case reunited him with DI Beverley Wharton; a woman who is notoriously cunning and who refuses to take no for an answer.  Beverly is jealous of Helena and has history with Eisenmenger, but when she receives some devastating personal news she delves deeper into her cases and realises she needs help ...

A young petty criminal is found stabbed leaving an elderly mother devastated, and the obvious suspect is a man who had threatened to kill him just hours before.

There is pressure on Beverley to close the case, but she is not so keen to follow orders, especially when Eisenmenger discovers that the weapon is a surgical scalpel.

For once she decides to follow her instincts rather than politics at the station.

There is enough circumstantial evidence to charge a local thug with murder but something does't add up and Beverly risks everything to find the truth.

With all this going on, the accidental death of a motorcyclist seems trivial, except that the body seems to have too many organs ...

Eisenmenger is immediately consumed by this disturbing discovery and when he realises Helena is missing, he and Beverly stumble upon an evil enterprise that puts both their lives in grave danger ...


Review:
I do hate it when Netgalley ‘blurbs’ do not indicate that the book is a number in a series, in this case number 7.  So the main characters have a load of history and are well defined.

I must admit that I was rather confused by the number of characters initially introduced in this novel who appeared to fall by the way side and yet they reappeared in the latter stage of the book.  I was also slightly confused by the use of Christian and surnames and who was siding with whom.

There is obviously a great backstory to these characters which has been dealt with in previous novels yet it is quite easy to join the party in book 7 and not really feel as though one is missing anything.

The plot in intriguing but the better informed reader (and I would not class myself as one of those readers) could work out the plot twist way before the DI.

I personally loved the English setting but disliked the use of some American prose which, for me, did not sit right with the characters and the book as a whole.

I did not like the dynamic between the two main characters or the pull of the higher ups on DI Wharton.

This is the seventh book in the series (and the first one I have read).  It does nothing to entice the reader to go back to the beginning or even to read further into the series; and this reader does love murder/mystery/thriller novels.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Which, in this case, was just 2 stars.