- this edition large print, W F Howes Ltd, 2020
- ISBN 978-1-00400-164-4
- 386 pages
- #2 in the Charlie George series
He loves surprises. But not this one.
A schoolgirl is found dead in a park in North London and DI Charlie George is not short of suspects – is it her stepfather? Is it a sex crime? Is it race-related?
Charlie finally thinks he has it sorted, with his killer bang to rights. But then his lawyer gets him free on a technicality.
And that’s just the start of his troubles.
He’s been a cop all his life, he thought he’d seen everything . . . But Charlie soon realises, he hasn’t seen anything yet.
A schoolgirl is found dead in a park in North London and DI Charlie George is not short of suspects – is it her stepfather? Is it a sex crime? Is it race-related?
Charlie finally thinks he has it sorted, with his killer bang to rights. But then his lawyer gets him free on a technicality.
And that’s just the start of his troubles.
He’s been a cop all his life, he thought he’d seen everything . . . But Charlie soon realises, he hasn’t seen anything yet.
My take
This is a year or so on from #1 in the series, LUCIFER FALLS. Charlie has been on leave recuperating from an injury received at the end of that story. He has "lost" his mistress from that book and has taken up with Pippa, a school teacher in London.
A phone call in the early hours calls Charlie to a suspected homicide on a disused railway line in Finsbury Park. It is an 11 year old girl who has only been missing for a few hours. Her body was found by her father. The body has been found near the ventilation shaft for the underground, and that's where the brick that killed her is also found.
The family is an immigrant one from Sierra Leone. They have already had a hard life,
CCTV footage shows the girl being followed by a known paedophile, and Charlie is convinced he is the murderer. Charlie teams up with a DC Lovejoy whom we have already met in the first novel in the series.
In Chapter 4 we "meet" the murderer, who tells us what he likes doing, where he likes hanging out, and that he has only murdered one person... so far. There will be more of this dialogue later in the book, but we are no wiser about the identity of the narrator.
So, on the surface, this is a police procedural, but it also about child abuse, community tensions and expectations, and the nature of evil.
A very good read!
My rating: 4.5
I've also read
4.6, LUCIFER FALLS
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