Review: SLAUGHTER PARK, Barry Maitland

• This edition made available through Libby by my local library
  
• First published: October 2016 Text Publishing, Australia
• Slaughter Park is the third and final book of the Belltree Trilogy.
• Length: 368pp
• ISBN: 9781925498905

Synopsis (author website)

Harry Belltree’s obsessive pursuit of justice has cost him everything – his job in homicide, his marriage and his newborn child. He has nothing left to lose, or so he thinks. Then his estranged wife disappears, leaving their baby daughter behind. The police think she has murdered a man. Harry thinks she’s in danger.

When severed limbs are found dangling from the branches of trees in a suburban park, Harry’s former colleagues are pulled off Jenny’s case. It’s up to Harry to track his missing wife down on his own.

And to lay bare, at last, the extraordinary conspiracy that led to his parents’ murder.

Slaughter Park is the third and final book of the Belltree Trilogy.

My Take

SLAUGHTER PARK takes up where ASH ISLAND left off.

Harry's wife has regained her sight and given birth to a baby daughter and when he visits her in hospital Jenny tells him he must go, leave them. She is frightened that the forces that have been following them will continue to pursue them and destroy them all. Harry takes Jenny at her word and he disappears and she hears nothing of him.

However when Jenny disappears nearly a year later, her sister uses the journalist Kelly Pool to find him and he comes back to Sydney to find her. Bodies have turned up in Slater Park, nicknamed Slaughter Park by the media, and the police are looking for Jenny, believing she has murdered a man.

Once again this is a novel about police corruption, political corruption, the domination of one family, and the death, years before, of Harry's parents. The threads that began with CRUCIFIXION CREEK are eventually resolved, some of them in a surprising twist.

I recommend the series to you. 

My rating: 4.5

I've also read

BRIGHT AIR
mini reviews

• 4.7, ALL MY ENEMIES  -#3 Brock & Kolla
• 5.0, NO TRACE - #8
• 4.7, SPIDER TRAP  - #9

4.7, DARK MIRROR - #10
4.8, CHELSEA MANSIONS - #11
4.7, THE RAVEN'S EYE -  #12
4.7, CRUCIFIXION CREEK

4.6, CRUCIFIXION CREEK
5.0, THE PROMISED LAND 

4.6, ASH ISLAND