by David Fennell
SYNOPSIS
A father is murdered in the dead of night in his London home, his head wrapped tightly in tape, a crude sad face penned over his facial features. But the victim's only child is left alive and unharmed at the scene.
Met Police detectives Grace Archer and Harry Quinn have more immediate concerns. Notorious gangster Frankie White has placed a target on Archer's back, and there's no one he won't harm to get to her.
Then a second family is murdered, leaving young Uma Whitmore as the only survivor.
With a serial killer at large, DI Archer and DS Quinn must stay alive long enough to find the connection between these seemingly random victims. Can they do it before another child is orphaned?
REVIEW
This is the third book featuring police detectives Grace Archer and Harry Quinn and in The Silent Man we actually get two stories running simultaneously. The first is Grace's ongoing battle against her nemesis and well-known gangster Frankie White. Frankie has dominated Grace's life and career as a police detective after killing her father and then going on to target Grace and her grandfather as revenge for the events that took place in the previous book See No Evil. This storyline showcases the darker side of London, the criminal and drugs scene and, particularly in this book, looks a lot at the effect of police corruption and how this impacts on the safety of the other officers and detectives.
The second side to this story is the actual police investigation, and it's an especially creepy one. A killer is entering the houses of their victims in the early evening and attacking while the victims are getting ready for bed. Before leaving, the killer covers the head of the victim in tape and draws a terrifying face onto the tape like a mask. With the number of victims racking up, Grace an Quinn don't have much to go on, just petty conflicts and rumours between a group of people. The two detectives and their team need to work out the connection between all of the victims quickly before anyone else is targeted.
I've read all three of the books in this series so I knew going into this story that it would be dark. However, I really feel like this book is the most traumatic - the killer's method is especially horrific and the descriptions of each attack were terrifying. I think that the fact that these attacks were very plausible was what made it so horrible. It wasn't a far-fetched setup, something that could actually happen and the fact that the killer was letting themselves into peoples houses and waiting to pounce undetected while they all thought they were safe is a truly scary thought.
A brilliant crime thriller, full of twists and shocking moments and definitely on the darker side of the scale. The Silent Man had me fooled a couple of times and is certainly not a book to read at home alone with the lights out!
Thanks to Compulsive Readers, Zaffre Books - @ZaffreBooks and David Fennell - @DavyFennell for the opportunity to read and review.
Publisher: Zaffre Books Genre: Crime Fiction / Police Procedural / Thriller
ISBN: 978-1804181737
Pages: 416pp
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