Perfect Remains by Helen Fields

The Blurb On The Back:

The perfect death leaves perfect remains …

On a remote Highland mountain, a body burns. All that’s left behind are the victim’s teeth and a fragment of silk. Meanwhile, in the hidden back room of a house in Edinburgh, a second woman screams into the darkness.

It’s DI Luc Callanach’s first day with Police Scotland, and he’s handed a homicide investigation. With everything to prove, he and his new colleague DI Ava Turner are up against a killer who meticulously covers his tracks.

When a third woman is taken, Callanach is desperate to prevent another innocent death – but the real fate of these women is more twisted than he could have ever imagined …

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Helen Fields’s debut crime thriller (the first in a series) is a well-paced if disturbingly violent and gruesome affair with a convincingly chilling antagonist and a refreshingly normal female lead character, but it’s let down by some stilted dialogue, a main character with a background I struggled to believe, an overblown ending and an obvious push for eventual romance between the two leads, which I didn’t think added much. Ava Turner is a refreshingly normal female detective not saddled with neurosis or an inability to look after herself or a desperation for a boyfriend. I enjoyed her professional support for Callanach and the competence of her own investigation and so could overlook her outburst about the Catholic Church (which seemed there purely to drive the plot). Callanach, by contrast, is saddled with a heavy-handed background - the bad boy early behaviour, modelling, extreme sports fixation and the event that drove him to Scotland was all just too much for him to be believable and it’s exacerbated when his past catches up with him in a ham-fisted way that made me roll my eyes. I also lost count of the number of times his French nationality was brought up. There’s a lot of violence in the book, some of which made me squirm but for the most part the antagonist is well drawn and chilling (if a little stereotypical towards the end) and I believed the way he broke down his victims (if there are more books it would be interesting to come back to them). Ultimately, while this book didn’t quite do it for me, there’s enough here for me to want to check out the next in the series.

PERFECT REMAINS was released in the United Kingdom on 26th January 2017. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

The Blurb On The Back:

France, 1956. Bernie Gunther is on the run. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s never to refuse a job from a high-ranking secret policeman. But this is exactly what he’s just done. Now he’s a marked man, with the East German Stasi on his tail.

Fleeing across Europe, he remembers the last time he worked with his pursuer: in 1939, to solve a murder at the Berghof, Hitler’s summer hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler is long dead, the Berghof now a ruined shell, and the bizarre time Bernie spent there should be no more than a distant memory.

But as he pushes on to Berlin and safety, Bernie will find that no matter how far he thinks he has put Nazi Germany behind him, for him it will always be unfinished business. The Berghof is not done with Bernie yet.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

The twelfth in Philip Kerr’s BERNIE GUNTHER SERIES is another tightly plotted historical thriller masterpiece split between two equally tense timeframes that sees the cynical-but-honest cop reflect on an investigation that pitched him into the heart of the Nazi elite where he was forced to choose between finding the truth and preserving his own life. The 1956 timeline appears to refer back to THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE, which I hadn’t read but which you don’t need to in order to follow this story because it’s essentially a framing device for the 1939 investigation. It was interesting to see Korsch return from THE PALE CRIMINAL and Kerr shows how the War and subsequent events have shaped both of them and removed any room for sentimentality between them. As always, Kerr’s use of real historical characters is superb with their cruelty, venality and frailty spill out across the page. The mystery is tightly written and although the culprit could be argued to come out of nowhere, it does fit in with the overriding themes and plotlines. The book ends with the promise of a fresh start for Bernie and I will definitely be checking out what happens to him next.

PRUSSIAN BLUE will be released in the United Kingdom on 4th April 2017. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.