I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Amazon Publishing UK in exchange for an honest review.
I was so excited when I saw this book was coming out. I read the first book in this series, Truth and Lies, only a few months ago and I found it to be a really enjoyable thriller. I am pleased to say that the sequel continues this trend.
My main concern upon finishing the first one was that I wasn't sure where the story could go. The main plot of Truth and Lies is that a detective discovers her birth mother is a serial killer and she must work with her secretly to uncover the locations of victims' bodies to give their families closure. This plot actually follows neatly on from this and the crime that must be solved involves a secret facility that experimented on children. One of these children supposedly died in a fire years ago but now someone claiming to be him is kidnapping children in the modern day and forcing their parents to play a deadly game to ensure their child's safe return. This plot wasn't quite as compelling to me as the first one but it did neatly incorporate the themes of children being lied to about their past and it offered some nice character moments for Amy, our main protagonist.
The writing in this continues to be of top quality. It was engaging and well-paced, although the plot was a lot more linear than the first book. While the first one had various intriguing subplots going on, this lacks pretty much any. That's not really a huge negative quality, it was just something missing that I had really enjoyed. There is sort of a subplot involving Amy's reporter ex-boyfriend but it's largely downplayed. Her serial killer mother is clearly going to play a large part in the next book but her presence in this one was a little intrusive and mostly seemed to serve to make sure we didn't forget who she was.
Overall, this is still a really enjoyable police procedural series and I am definitely excited for the next ones to come out. I appreciate police procedurals with consistent themes and interesting characters which this provides in spades. The crime of this could have been stronger but it was a great thriller on the whole.
Overall Rating:
.5
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