#LifeSentence by A.K. Turner @AnyaLipska @ZaffreBooks #BlogTour #CassieRaven #BookReview

Title: Life Sentence by A.K. Turner

Date Published: 14th April 2022

Publisher: Zaffre

Genre: Crime Thriller

Description:

Following her first outing in Body Language (published 2019), Camden mortuary technician Cassie Raven returns to solve another ingenious forensic mystery. 

Mortuary technician Cassie Raven believes the last thoughts of the dead linger like static in the air…

Cassie has always had a strange affinity with death, ever since her parents were killed in a car crash when she was four. At least that’s what she grew up believing…

But that was a lie. Cassie’s father is alive. He was convicted of murdering her mother and spent years behind bars. Now he’s out – and he’s looking for her.

He swears he didn’t do it. And Cassie wants to believe him.

To find the truth, she must turn detective. As she seeks answers, help is to be found in inexplicable places – for the dead are ready to talk.

Review:

I want to thank Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting me on this blog tour and Zaffre for providing me with a copy of Life Sentence in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed mortuary assistant Cassie Raven’s first outing, Body Language, so I jumped at the chance to read Life Sentence. I would highly recommend you start with book one first to get to know Cassie and the other characters better.

Life Sentence is an utterly gripping crime thriller with an unusual protagonist and emotional rollercoaster of a storyline. 

At the end of the last book, there were revelations for Cassie after finding out that her dad was actually alive and murdered her mother twenty years earlier. She’s really struggling with everything and doubting her memories, not helped by the fact that her father comes back into her life claiming that he’s innocent. Unsure whether or not to believe him, she digs into her mother’s case, unable to move on until she finds the truth.

As with the first book, I enjoyed the back and forth between Cassie and DS Phyllida Flyte. They seem like opposites. Flyte is uptight and by the book, whereas Cassie has a more I don’t care what people think of me attitude but underneath all that they care about people and that justice is served. I also feel there’s a bit of chemistry between the two and I wonder where that’s heading.

I really enjoyed learning more about Cassie and her childhood throughout the novel, but we also learned more about Flyte and events in her own background, too.

The tension builds up nicely through the story, with plenty of little shocks along the way that kept me turning those pages.

I had a sneaking suspicion who the culprit could be about halfway through the book, but the story kept me doubting myself until the big reveal.

Life Sentence has left me wanting more and I can’t wait to see what will happen next for Cassie Raven!

About the Author:

A.K. Turner’s first foray into crime fiction was a detective thriller trilogy, written under the pen name Anya Lipska, following the adventures of Janusz Kiszka, a fixer to London’s Polish community. All three books won critical acclaim and were twice optioned as a possible TV series. In her other life as a TV producer and writer, A.K. makes documentaries and drama-docs on subjects as diverse as the Mutiny on the Bounty, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and Monty Don’s Italian Gardens.