Published
by Macmillan, 4 December 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-4472-4611-4
Mari Hannah’s DCI Kate Daniels
has just been optioned for TV, which is excellent news for anyone who enjoys
action-packed police drama with a feisty female cop in the leading role. Killing
for Keeps, the fifth in the series, has great telly potential; it moves
outside the confines of Kate’s Northumbrian ‘manor’, and features a couple of
charismatic villains as well as the usual suspects in the Murder Investigation
Team.
Hannah doesn’t flinch from the gruesome
stuff either; the investigation is triggered by the discovery of two tortured
murder victims, who prove to be brothers, and the sons of a notorious gang
leader, responsible in his day for a large proportion of the organized crime on
Kate Daniels’s patch.
The maverick cop is a staple of crime
fiction, and Kate Daniels is as maverick as they come – and not just because
she’s a lesbian. She is never afraid to go it alone and work outside the
system, though she goes to some lengths to protect her team from the
consequences of her own rule-breaking.
The case moves ahead in fits and starts,
and keeps stalling as one lead after another takes the detectives nowhere.
Meanwhile, Kate herself is in a bad way. Already exhausted after another trying
investigation, she is still not quite coming to terms with the breakdown of her
relationship with psychological profiler Jo Soulsby, and both her former boss
and mentor DCS Bright and her work partner Hank Gormley begin to worry for her
health, both physical and mental – especially when she begins to feel
responsible for the fate of an informant she hasn’t even admitted exists.
Maintaining the pace and keeping the
pages turning in these circumstances is no mean feat, but Mari Hannah is well
up to the task. She knows her locations inside-out, and ensures the reader does
too. Her knowledge of MIT procedure is second to none, but the detailed
research is worn lightly; the reader is made party to everything that goes on
in the murder room via the well-drawn diverse personalities of the detectives.
Killing for Keeps is a
first-class addition to the series.
------
Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
Mari Hannah was born in London. She now lives in a
small Northumberland village with her partner, a former murder detective. Mari
became a writer after her career as a Probation Officer was cut short
following an assault on duty. She began using a computer because it was too
painful to write with a pen. Ironically, the idea that she might one day
become a writer then began to form in her head. She tried
different forms of writing before settling on prose, and spent several
years scriptwriting. She then turned her
attention to the BBC, pitching a television serial based on characters in her
then unfinished debut crime novel The
Murder Wall. After completing the TV script, she went back to the
book she had started years before but somehow never thought she’d finish.
Lynne
Patrick
has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success
with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a
novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and
is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives
on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of
them crime fiction.
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