Review: A DARK AND TWISTED TIDE, Sharon Bolton (S.J. Bolton)

• this edition published by Bantam Press 2014
  
• ISBN: 9780593069196
• 444 pages
• source: my local library
• #4 Lacey Flint series
• author website: http://www.sharonbolton.com/

Synopsis ( author website)

Police sergeant Lacey Flint thinks she’s safe.

She thinks her new job with the river police, and her new life on a house boat, will keep her away from danger. But she’s wrong.

When Lacey discovers a body in the water, and sinister offerings appear in her home, she fears someone is trying to expose her darkest secret.

And the river is the last place she should be.

My Take

I'm sure I have read an S.J. Bolton title before but not in the history of this blog apparently, hence the "new-to-me" label.

So I broke into this series so to speak and there were references to events in Lacey Flint's past that I really needed a bit more background to.

Nevertheless the novel really worked quite well for me. Plenty of tension. References to recent political events such as the war in Afghanistan, people smuggling, IVF etc. The setting is the River Thames and Lacey Flint has come to work with the River Police. She finds a body floating in the river near her home, wrapped in burial cloths. It links with an event in the past where she was nearly drowned, when her team apprehended a boat smuggling a woman late at night. Parts of the story are also told from the point of view of a couple of the women who have been brought in from overseas. It is unclear for most of the story why these women are being brought into Britain but some of them are turning up as corpse.

My rating: 4.5

About the author

Sharon Bolton's previous novels have been published under the title of S.J. Bolton. I am not sure what has prompted the name change - a perhaps a desire to be separated on the shelves from other SJ crime fiction authors such as S.J. Watson and S.J. Rozan.
In 2014 she was awarded a CWA Dagger in the Library.