Genre: Mystery/Thriller.
Description:
TWO MOTHERS HAVE LOST THEIR DAUGHTERS — SEVENTEEN YEARS APART. CAN DETECTIVE CALLADINE BRING THEM JUSTICE?
A teenage girl’s body is found in the back of a car on the notorious Hobfield housing estate. No one had reported her missing, but she’s been dead for a week.
Meanwhile, an old jar is brought into the station. It was found carefully wrapped in a blanket, with a child’s pink hairclip. The jar contains ashes and bone fragments.
Seventeen years ago, Detective Tom Calladine had been part of a team investigating the disappearance of Jessica Wilkins. Her mother had taken her to Leesdon Park one summer afternoon. She went to get the child an ice cream and when she returned her daughter was gone. Over the years there were no sightings, no witnesses — nothing.
Will there finally be closure for this unsolved mystery?
And why was the girl found in the car killed and why are her friends not telling the police the whole story?
Detectives Tom Calladine and Ruth Bayliss will unravel a web of lies and pain, in this fast-moving and gripping crime mystery.
Full of twists and turns, this is a crime thriller that will keep you turning the pages until the stunning conclusion.
If you like Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott, Mel Sherratt, Ruth Rendell, or Mark Billingham you will enjoy this exciting new crime fiction writer.
DEAD JEALOUS is book seven of a new series of detective thrillers featuring D.S. Ruth Bayliss and D.I. Tom Calladine.
THE DETECTIVES
Tom Calladine is a detective inspector who is devoted to his job. His personal life, however, is not so successful. Having been married and divorced before the age of twenty-one has set a pattern that he finds difficult to escape.
Ruth Bayliss is in her mid-thirties, plain-speaking but loyal. She is balancing her professional life with looking after a small child.
THE SETTING
The fictional village of Leesdon on the outskirts of an industrial northern English city. There is little work and a lot of crime. The bane of Calladine’s life is the Hobfield housing estate, breeding ground to all that is wrong with the area that he calls home.
DISCOVER YOUR NEXT FAVOURITE MYSTERY SERIES NOW
THE CALLADINE & BAYLISS MYSTERY SERIES
Book 1: DEAD WRONG
Book 2: DEAD SILENT
Book 3: DEAD LIST
Book 4: DEAD LOST
Book 5: DEAD & BURIED
Book 6: DEAD NASTY
Book 7: DEAD JEALOUS
Review:
So this it the first Calladine and Bayliss novel I’ve read which being the seventh one, which was probably not the ideal place to start!
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the characters of Tom Calladine who’s only stable relationship is the one with his partner Ruth Bayliss, who is trying to grapple with motherhood, a distant partner and policing, but I felt like the author assumed every reader had read the last six books before this one and missed a lot of details out. I still am not entirely sure what either detective looks like. I could have also really done with a brief recap or something of what had happened in the previous books.
I did feel like the plot relied a lot on coincidences. For instance, Flora Appleton, the teenager who is murdered at the very beginning of the book), happened to live, with her mother, in the same block of flat as the mother of the missing two year old Jessica Wilkins. How small a town is Leesdon? (There are more examples than that but I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone reading this.)
Anyway the thing that saved it for me was the author’s writing style. It was so fast paced, I finished the book in around two days (that is fast for me I can tell you!) because I desperately wanted to know who the killers were.
I may have to go back to the beginning and read the first book Dead Wrong.
Rating: 3/5
I received a copy of this via NetGalley.
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