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Tuesday, 21 June 2022

The Lost Ones (Detective Jackie Cooke #1) by Marnie Riches

 


Description from Goodreads:

"The young woman was sitting as though she might get up at any minute, her dark brown hair hanging over her shoulders. But her blue eyes were staring into the distance, into the future she would never get to see…

Despite all Detective Jackie Cooke’s experience, the murder of vulnerable teenager Chloe Smedley shakes her to the core. Chloe’s body has been left in a cold backyard, carefully posed to make it look like she could get up at any minute. As Jackie studies her innocent face, she vows to find the monster who did this.

When Jackie tells Chloe’s mother her daughter is gone, the woman’s cries cut through her. She knows the pain of an unsolved crime only too well – the disappearance of her brother as a child still haunts her family. Determined to solve the case, Jackie sets to work, finding footage of Chloe waving at someone the day she went missing. Did she know her killer?

But then a second body is found, arranged on the side of the road in another macabre scene, and Jackie becomes sure she is hunting a serial killer. Someone has been preying on the missing and vulnerable for decades. Only Jackie seems to see that they were never lost. They were taken.

Her boss is pushing for a quick solution and has no time for Jackie’s theory. But then Jackie returns home to find a brightly coloured bracelet on her kitchen counter – the same one her brother was wearing the day he vanished. The killer is taunting her directly. And Jackie will bring him to justice, no matter the risk… "

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Oh my goodness ... what a cracker of an opener to a new series!

There is so much to like about this book - the characters, the plot, the pace, the twists, the back-stories, the inventiveness of the murders, the writing style - pretty much all of it to be honest which made this a particularly hard book to put down.  Luckily, I was on holiday so didn't have the usual work and life distractions so was able to devour the pages at my leisure.

Jackie is a strong, female character; she might be heavily pregnant, the mother of twin boys, with a musician for a husband, her mother living in her basement and a boss that clearly doesn't like her but she doesn't let these hold her back or prevent her and her team from investigating what is a horrific set of murders.

The book is packed full of tension, secrets, lies and the twists and turns and the scenes of peril just keep coming.  A warning here though, the descriptions of the murders are quite graphic so if you don't like to read that sort of thing, you might want to skip over those bits.

My verdict - an excellent new series to get my teeth into and I can't wait to see what happens next with Jackie and her team and I must give my thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for enabling me to read The Lost Ones and to share my thoughts.

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