Wel heel spannende detective over een team rechercheurs, met Stella aan het hoofd. Stella heeft een vriend en een minnaar en vindt het erg moeilijk om te kiezen. Er worden jonge vrouwen geheel verminkt, lang gemarteld met een mes gevonden. Het oplossen duurt best lang omdat er weinig aanknopingspunten zijn. De daders zijn een man en een vrouw. De vrouw is door haar moeder regelmatig met een mes bewerkt als kind, zo gaat dat dóór. De man is een afgewezen volger. Uiteindelijk wordt bekend dat hij de dader is en dat bekoopt hij ook met de dood. ( )

This is the second novel to feature the engaging Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney from the Area Major Investigation Pool (AMIP), and it is just a good as its predecessor, 'The Dead Sit Round In A Ring'.. Her 'manor' includes the dreadful Harefield Estate which, under the appellation 'Fortress Harefield' has become a virtual no-go area for the police. Stella, however, knows the Harefield quite well - after all, she grew up there.

The novel opens with the discovery of the corpse of a beautiful woman who had worked in a dynamic and thrusting advertising agency. She is no longer beautiful when found, however, having been the victim of a frenzied attack and then lying undiscovered for eight days. Shortly afterwards another corpse is discovered, and the evidence suggests that the cause of death was identical. The evidence also suggests, unusually, that there were two perpetrators, and that one of them was a woman.

Meanwhile Mooney has enough problems of her own. She has been living with her partner, George, for six years and until recently everything had been fine. However, that was before who had met John Delaney, a freelance reporter, with whom she has gradually been falling increasingly deeply in love. The strains of the job have also been telling in her, and she is regularly visiting a psychotherapist, and too frequently seeking support form the odd shot of vodka. Don't worry, though, if this makes her sound like just another flawed detective, burdened with the normally clichéd suite of sorrows. Lawrence handles Stella's demons masterfully, and she never comes close to any police procedural stereotype.

As with the first novel, the depiction of the horrors of life on the Harefield Estate is grim yet also rather hypnotic. Every building on the estate seems to boast its own bordello, illegal distillery, armoury and drug warehouse, and life there is lived to a wholly alien set of rules and social mores.

This is a very entertaining and gripping story. ( )

Loved this
Det Stella Mooney
Once she had been beautiful. Now she was eight days dead, her body slashed with more than fifty cuts.

Janis Parker - young, successful and glamorous - had shared her modern Notting Hill apartment with flatmate Stephanie James. But now Janis is dead - and Stephanie has disappeared.

Heading up the investigation, Detective Stella Mooney soon has her first suspect, in the shape of Mark Ross - Stephanie's boyfriend and Janis's secret lover . . .

But then another body is discovered - slashed fifty times.

Clearly these are no domestic killings. It seems Stella and her team are looking for that most dangerous of creatures: a killer who hunts to feed a terrible appetite.

But the truth is they are up against something even more terrifying. . . ( )