The usual gaps in logic and credibility stretches peculiar to the genre are here (oh that ending...) but Starling's ability to juggle his separate plot lines----a detective with PTSD, a serial killer, the mysterious sinking of a ferry, a soured father-daughter relationship-----before bringing them all together for the final curtain is commendable. A good summer vacation novel. ( )

Although the first chapter is uncomfortably long (61 pages), it is so good you barely care. You are right there, alongside Kate as she escapes a sinking ferry, tasting the sea water and engine oil as you battle for survival together.

Kate is a police officer, and upon return to work, she is assigned to catch a serial killer. We follow her investigation, which she conducts while still trying to recover from the trauma caused by the disaster. The account of her hunt for the killer is interspersed with the enquiry into the sinking, which is led by her father (a marine investigator). The two threads of the story run in parallel, and it’s only in the final chapter that they come together, and the link between the two is suddenly and terrifyingly evident.

Starling has clearly done very detailed research – especially on the effect of trauma on behaviour – but this information is so beautifully melded with the storyline that you barely notice.

The characterisation is also brilliant– you really get to know the people involved, and empathize with them as they come alive on the page. This is even true of the killer: although it’s unnerving to enter his mind, you can’t help but feel some sympathy for him as you discover how his childhood drove him to this psychological state. You hope he can be rescued from himself before it is too late.

The novel’s continuous use of the present tense is a little tiring, but you do get used to it after a while. Personally, I also found a couple of passages too gruesome to read, but that wasn’t because they were gratuitous; rather that I’m squeamish.

Overall, this is a beautifully written thriller that gripped me like no other has managed for years. I don’t understand why Starling isn’t better known. ( )

This second thriller by Boris Starling is as good as his first. DCI Kate Beauchamp is on a ferry when it sinks. This would be traumatic enough but now her estranged father is now investigating the disaster. She plunges herself into work in hopes of fighting off survivor's guilt and comes up against a horrific serial killer. There are actually more credibility leaps in this story than in his first, but Starling's story telling is compelling enough so that I forgive him totally. ( )