Today I’m taking part in the blog tour for The Guilty Girl. My review is written with thanks to the team at Bookouture for inviting me on the blog tour and for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Something whistling through the door behind her caused her to turn. A shadow spread across the opening. She clasped a hand to her mouth, stilling the fear that was rising. The menacing shadow was followed by a face that sent a cold shiver down her spine…

When the call comes in about Lucy, a seventeen-year-old girl murdered after the secret party she held in her parents’ home, Detective Lottie Parker is first on the scene. As she picks her way through the smashed glasses and the blood spatter on the perfect cream carpet, she is horrified to see Lucy’s angelic face, silvery-blue eyes forever closed.

As Lottie breaks the news to Lucy’s heartbroken parents and the devastated partygoers, she discovers that hours before her death Lucy had revealed a terrible secret about her friend Hannah. And when Lottie finds Lucy’s bloodstained clothing hidden in Hannah’s bedroom, she has no option but to bring the shy, frightened girl into custody.

But Hannah claims to have no memory of the night Lucy died and Lottie begins to question her guilt. Then a fifteen-year-old boy who also attended the party is pulled from the canal. And as Lottie investigates, she discovers something shocking. Her own son Sean was at the party. Why did he lie to her? Is her beloved child a witness or a suspect… or is he now in the killer’s sights?

If you love Karin Slaughter, Robert Dugoni and Rachel Caine, you’ll be hooked by this heart-stopping thriller from Patricia Gibney. The Guilty Girl will have you gripped until the very last page.

Review:

I’m so pleased that Lottie Parker is back and I can’t believe this is my eleventh outing with her and her wonderful family! She continues to be the feisty, determined detective we know and love. Her attempts to avoid her boss made me snort with laughter and while she doesn’t so much bend the rules as snap them in half, I always trust her to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Her trusty sidekick, Boyd, is in Malaga for this instalment and whilst we do see a little bit of him, it’s interesting to see how Lottie manages without him for the majority of the investigation. 

Interspersed between the main story, there are sections by “the magpie”, who is our killer. This helps us to see exactly how twisted and evil they are and makes us root for the police even more, but it still kept the mystery alive as it didn’t give me any clues! 

This investigation gives Lottie an unholy mess to unscramble! There are so many suspects, so many people with potential motives and so much more going on under the surface than first appears. This means the investigation moves quite slowly, but that doesn’t slow down the pace of the novel! I loved trying to work everything out and it was definitely a rollercoaster ride doing so! 

There is still a lot to come from this series and I can’t wait to see what happens next! 

The Guilty Girl is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: