Michelle DaviesRezensionen

Michelle Davies has crafted one of the best thrillers I've ever read, honestly.

It's rare for me to get so caught up in a thriller novel. Normally, I know what's coming and just bumble along and read it for the fun. With this book, I had so many theories about what was going on and it was exciting! The twists and turns along the way had me recrafting my theories until I was almost spot on near the end. The entire story is written well that it all builds on each other, until you come to the finale and everything just clicks.

Maggie Neville is a Family Liaison Officer who is dealing with two crimes at the same time. An elderly woman has been attacked, and it appears to be the same duo hurting other elderly ladies who live alone. And then a husband and wife appear to have been in a scuffle, possibly from a domestic dispute. And then, she realizes they might not be so different from each other...

There's so many parts to this story. Sadie, the elderly lady who was attacked, has only her granddaughter Della as a family member. That family has drama since Della's Mother long since disappeared and never returned. Della believes her Mother attacked Sadie. Then there's Eleanor, who was attacked by her husband in a domestic dispute. Add in that Maggie has her own dark secrets that could tear her family apart, and that her co-workers are trying to find the duo who were attacking old ladies... There's a lot going on.

Despite all of these interconnecting plot lines, the story is packed tight perfectly. I never felt like the plots were too much! Michelle spends enough time on each plot line that when it switches over to another character, I'm not disappointed. I honestly was surprised with how great this book worked for me. I need the rest of this series STAT!

I'd highly recommend this book. I am totally impressed and even managed to go through it a second time to see what I missed. This perfectly crafted book needs an audience! It'd be a real shame for it not to grab it!

Side Note: You do not need to read the rest of this series to know what's going on. You get filled in with enough information to know what's happening.

Five out of five stars!

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

3 but marking it 4 as I liked it a bit more than others I've liked. Will continue the series

I'll continue the series

Terrible couldn’t read

3.5 stars
I did enjoy this easy to read crime drama. It was a feasible plot with realistic characters

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

I have really enjoyed the previous novels in this series, but found this one a little disappointing. On the plus side, after a slow beginning, the plot moved fast, and I thought the author did a good job of keeping the reader guessing about the identity of the murderer. On the other hand, when his identity was revealed it was something of an anticlimax, and his motivation and method hard to comprehend.

I wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with the story was its setting in Spain. We were supposed to believe that not only did a murder which took place abroad 10 years ago have a team of four British detectives still working on it, but also that these detectives would be permitted to carry out an almost unsupervised cold case investigation in Spain. Heroine Maggie's instant attraction to George, the brother of the victim, read like a bad romance novel and Maggie's actions with regard to George were wildly out of character to the extent that they threw me out of the story, especially as he had little personality and what there was of it was creepy. Maggie also acted without regard to her own safety or presumably to protocol at the very end, but this fortunately worked out for her.

In previous books I have found Maggie likeable and relatable, but this one didn't work for me. (There were also a few places where entire lines of text were missing, but I am assuming this will be corrected before publication).

This is the fourth in the DC Maggie Neville series of books but it's my first and I can honestly say that it didn't matter a jot that I hadn't read the others. Anything of importance was explained enough and the other stuff wasn't relevant to the story in Dead Guilty. That's not to say that it wouldn't have been nice to start from the beginning and follow Maggie through the series but it's just not a necessity.

What appealed to me in particular about Dead Guilty was the cold case aspect and also that it's set in Majorca. It gave a different edge to the police procedural/crime genre. The cold case is that of Katy Pope, a 17 year old who was murdered whilst on holiday with her family ten years previously. Her parents, brother and boyfriend head back to Majorca for a memorial and to see if a new appeal will bring forth any new information. Also going to the island are the small police team who are still trying to find out who killed Katy, and this includes Maggie.

I rather liked Maggie. I found her sensible in her work (if not in her private life), quite calm and measured in her thinking, and I particularly liked her way of dealing with difficult people and the way she could shut people down without being nasty or getting angry. I found the Majorcan aspect really interesting and the way the team had to interact with the Spanish police who didn't really want the British contingency to be there added an extra complication to the investigation.

I was kept guessing until the end, with my focus shifting between various possible culprits. The author did a good job with the red herrings and I was racing through the last few chapters to see how it would all turn out.

Although Maggie made a bit of a mess of things, there was a strand of the story that I thought might just be explored in future books and I'd be really interested to see if that happened. The ending also made me wonder what direction her life is going to go in next. She's such an engaging character, a Family Liaison Officer as well as a detective, and I'm really pleased to have read this instalment of her story.

This was excellent. I don't think I have ever read another series where the Family Liaison Officer is the heroine. This was a potentially disturbing crime - did an 11 year old push a friend off a wall to his death? - handled well. The plot moved along at a brisk pace, secrets were uncovered, the reason for the original death was convincing and understandable, and (finally and vert satisfactorily) a character I particularly disliked got what was coming to him.

Highly recommended.

I didn’t particularly like this thriller. I found it a little predictable and consequently boring. It wasn’t terrible but just not memorable or very interesting.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The blurb makes it sound as if the story is mostly about Eleanor and Simon aka the query murder/ suicide case where both victims survive, but in fact more time is devoted to the attack on pensioner Sadie with the missing daughter Helen. Then, of course, both cases merge in a rather unlikely way, which is handy as Maggie is the FLO appointed to both...

I found this novel interesting and fairly fast-paced, but struggled to keep going at one point: Renshaw was being horrible to Maggie, Will had dumped her, Lou was being a terrible sister, mother and general human being etc etc. However, I pushed through and things picked up, although I wish Maggie had dwelt longer on the realization that it is a really bad idea to date your boss. (I wouldn't date hime anyway.) Bea's character seemed a bit off - I know she was only 14, but her plan to keep going to the hospital to apologize... Della was also rather tiresome. Eleanor/Gillian's motivation being "general madness" was lazy writing/plotting.

I'm glad Maggie's big secret about Jerome has come out, although her parents seem to swing wildly between favouring one daughter over the other. Looking forward to the next one.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

Mack and Lesley's 15 year old daughter Rosie goes missing from their garden while she is revising for her GCSEs. The family recently won 15 million GBP on the lottery and has moved to a big house in an upmarket village. Maggie is one of the family liaison officers assigned to the case.

I read a lot of police procedurals, but have never read one from the perspective of the FLO, so this was interesting. Maggie manages to explain a good deal about the role of an FLO, although she does go a bit Indiana Jones towards the end to save the day single-handedly. There was quite a lot of back story about Maggie having previously been disciplined as an FLO, which made the book seem less like the first in a series, although I'm pretty sure it is - I sense a "will they-won't they" romance brewing.

I was very impressed. There are chapters from the perspective of a character clearly implicated in Rosie's disappearance, and his motivations made very good sense, especially in the light of his steroid usage and health. Various plot threads came together by the end, in a way which seemed fluid rather than forced.

I would be keen to read more by this author.