BLIND FURY by Lynda La Plante is Book 6 in her Anna Travis Mysteries series. It is an excellent ‘police procedural’ mystery - full of suspense, character studies, plot twists and turns. It feels as if one is actually working on the case in the incident room. It is that realistic.
The ending stunned me. I can’t even process it or write about it yet.
The series is highly recommended. ( )

Plenty of betrayal and mystery in this debut romantic suspense. Mick Fury met best friend Rob in basic training. They went on to become Air Force Parajumpers before switching to private security contractors with Claymore. When on their latest assignment in Afghanistan Rob is killed during an ambush and makes Mick promise he will protect his sister Jenna who has already had so much tragedy in her life.

When Mick gets back to the states he does what he can for a grieving Jenna while also keeping his distance which was another promise he made to Rob as he’s typically known as a playboy who lives for adrenaline rushes. But when they notice they are being followed and Jenna’s home is destroyed they figure out Rob must have stumbled onto something while in Afghanistan.

Mick has his hands full not only trying to protect Jenna but also trying to keep her from digging deeper into what happened to Rob while not alerting the bad guys who may be far closer than they think.

This was equal parts suspense and romance. Mick and Jenna both have misconceptions - Mick's are about himself and Jenna's are about Mick. As the two are trying to figure out the who and what about who's after them they also have to deal with the feelings that have always been there between them.
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In this sexually charged thriller Detective Inspector Anna Travis, finds herself leading the investigation of the murders of three women whose bruised and raped bodies had been dumped in a field close to the M1, the major thoroughfare between London and Manchester. All the girls had the same MO and no DNA had been left at the scene.
Carefully piecing together the clues, digging up dirt in places the former investigator missed, Travis has to work carefully not to antagonize the crew she was working with as well as keeping her former lover, and now boss, at arm’s length. The evidence mounts and they run into increasing dead end after dead end until a letter arrives from Cameron Welsh, a prisoner who Travis previously helped put away for sexual homicide. Welsh is kept under close surveillance in a top security wing at Barfield Prison in Leeds.
Welsh claims to have information to help solve the murders. Is this just a bored prisoner looking for sexual kicks of his own or does he really have knowledge on the subject that will help another young lady from meeting a similar fate?
During her trips to Barfield Prison, Travis is subjected to all manners of disgusting tirades from Welsh, who does however, prove to be useful in some of the scenarios he poses, and at the same time Travis falls hard for the young prison guard Ken Hudson. In the process of falling head-over-heels for the guard, she finds evidence which suggests that perhaps he may be involved in the disappearance of the murdered girls.
This tear-away thriller will keep you awake at night, prying your closing eyes open with toothpicks, to get to the next clue. Definitely a rip-roaring, can’t-put-it-down read.
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Linda LaPlante writes excellent police procedurals in several series. This one features DI Anna Travis whom we saw earlier involved in a ridiculous affair with her boss, Superintendent Langton who continues to have a presence and influence on the investigations. He's also a very bright detective as we see in one scene.

The scenes with Cameron Walsh were a bit too reminiscent of "Silence of the Lambs." Walsh is a killer Travis had jailed years earlier but he's obsessed with her and claims to be able to help with their investigation into the deaths of young foreign workers.

You get a real sense for the plodding tediousness of a difficult investigation with few clues. It's definitely not a thriller but seems to me to be a more accurate depiction of how frustrating and repetitive an investigation can be. I rather liked the repeated interviews, tracking down and interviewing witnesses, the interplay among the characters, and the tedious seeming lack of progress that many other reviewers decried. I'm not so wild about the romantic relationships that Travis finds herself in constantly but which often lend little to the overall plot. An attempt at building up the character, I suppose.

A thriller it's not, but as a realistic portrayal of the frustrations of police investigations, it's top-notch.


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Yes, I did just review a Lynda LaPlante title recently. (Blood Line - my review) That was my first introduction to the Detective Inspector Anna Travis series. Well, I was in need of an audio book to listen to, so I thought I would download the previous book - Blind Fury.

DI Travis is called in when a young woman's body is found in a ditch by a highway service station. With the amount of traffic passing through and by, finding a suspect will be difficult. But when further investigation turns up another young woman killed in the same manner, the team realizes they may have a serial killer on their hands. But what they don't have is any clues. Convicted killer Cameron Walsh insists he has information to share - but he will only talk to Anna - the copper who put him behind bars.

The reader was Kim Hicks. Her voice was excellent, providing lots of different voices and accents for various characters.

It's always different listening to a book rather than reading. Unless you fast forward, you hear every word. If you're reading, it's possible to skim over some passages. I enjoyed the plotting in Blind Fury crime and the solid investigation by the team. What I did find a bit tiresome was Anna's love life in this book. It was all a bit swoony for me. Now, I will rarely go backwards in a series as I find it frustrating to already know what's going to happen and where the character is going. And in this case, I was right. I knew what the shock was going to be in the final chapters and it did spoil the book a bit for me.

So, will I read/listen to another Anna Travis book? Yes, as I really enjoyed Blood Line. But I won't be hunting down any others in the back list. ( )