I have greatly enjoyed the third entry in the series featuring PI Samantha (Sam) Falconer. Sam has a troubled past believing her father to have died when she was four years old only to have him surface some 28 years later and to learn that he has a very violent past, with which she has yet to come to terms.
But on this May morning on top of Magdalen Tower in Oxford, Sam’s father has been absent from her life for some months, and she is enjoying with her brother Mark who teaches at St Barnabas College, the May Day celebration of Spring. Unusually this year they are a threesome as Mark has with him his new love Brendan, handsome and strangely it seems to Sam, rather reticent about himself, but it is early days in the relationship so Sam curbs her curiosity.
When one of Mark’s students is found dead in his rooms suspicion falls on Mark. Back in her London office Sam is confronted by Rick McGann who wants her help to find where his father is buried. And a call from the Provost of St Barnabas’s, Edward Payne tasks her with finding who has been sending him threatening letters, which have now taken a sinister turn.
Then her brother Mark vanishes and Sam is thrown into turmoil, and fears that her brutal family history is at the root of his disappearance, but how can she help him.
Phew, this has everything the lover of mysteries could ever want. Three fascinating mysteries, family secrets, wonderful
complex characters – Frank Cooper almost stealing the whole show, and action from Oxford to Iraq, and all overshadowed
by Ireland.
Although the solutions to the plots are satisfactorily tied up, there is just one element that is tantalizingly left open …. So I will just have to have that next book.
A gripping story that I had to finish once I had started. I cannot recommend this book too highly.
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Lizzie Hayes
The two earlier books in the series are Bloodless Shadow and Cutting Blades.