Today I’m joining the blog tour for Broken Bones. My review is written with thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Some bodies just won’t stay buried…

After putting a stop to one of Edinburgh’s most notorious serial killers 3 years ago, DCI Liam Brodie is known as a man who can handle – and solve – the hardest of cases. But when he’s assigned to Fife’s Major Investigations Team, he soon realises that he’s walking into a minefield. The previous DCI is missing, presumed dead, and the case he’s been called in to lead becomes dangerously close to home.

When a child’s bones are unearthed beneath the floorboards of an old house in Fife – the same house where his girlfriend, psychologist Ruth Calder, grew up as a foster daughter – Brodie uncovers a tangled web of lies and jealousy. Ruth’s foster mother, now gripped by dementia, holds fragments of the truth but in a community haunted by its history, Brodie must navigate betrayal and buried guilt to bring a decades-old secret to light.

But at what cost to those he loves most?

Review:

I love a new detective series, and this series featuring DCI Liam Brodie gets off to a flyer with a prologue where the protagonist is in a very dangerous situation. This meant I was hooked from the beginning and I wanted to know how the prologue would be relevant to the rest of the story and this was always in the back of my mind as I was reading.

At the beginning, Broken Bones switches location frequently between Edinburgh and Fife, with two different teams operating in the different areas. It did take me some time to work out how the two strands of the story would come together but John Carson does this in a way that maintains the drama really well. This approach gives the author the opportunity to introduce a wealth of characters. I enjoyed getting to know them all and I enjoyed the strong camaraderie within the team, which I hope will continue as the series progresses.

The plot of Broken Bones is actually quite slow burning as John Carson sets up the different elements of the plot. However, in the final third of the novel, the tension and sense of danger really ramps up again and I really wanted to see if the perpetrator would be caught. There are a few twists and turns along the way and they kept me on my toes until the very end.

There is definitely a lot of scope for the series to continue and I look forward to reading the next instalment.

Broken Bones is available from Amazon.

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