Close to Home (DI Adam Fawley #1) by Cara Hunter.

8 year old Daisy Mason disappears from her family home in Oxford whilst her parents are hosting a BBQ party in their garden. Daisy appears to have vanished into thin air right beneath her parents noses. Detective Inspector Adam Fawley and his team at Thames Valley police start an investigation to find her.

Close to Home is a regular British Police Procedural Crime Thriller that is very easy for the reader to drop into. Although DI Adam Fawley is the main police character, he is part of a team and ALL the other police officers take a full part in this story. There is a diverse range of characters throughout this novel and they are all developed rather well.

I did however have some frustrations with the format of this book. The story floated backwards and forwards in time with the beginnings of each chapter clearly labelled as xx days before the disappearance OR the current day and date. You were then getting background and information that the police had no knowledge of, so you were at times ahead of the police. You are drip fed the story of DI Adam Fawley’s son Jake, tiny piece by tiny piece and this is not essential to the plot but is a distraction. As the story unfolds, things develop to show that every single character may have been responsible for the disappearance of Daisy Mason. Totally ignored is the assumption of innocent until proven guilty and every character is made out to be the bad guy. It would have been nice to have characters who were really nice people and did not raise any suspicions of foul play.

Still, I enjoyed reading Close to Home and accepted the way Cara had chosen to tell her tale. I simply went with the flow and let this story carry me along. I tried not to think who the bad guy was and gave all the characters the benefit of the doubt. Then there was a trigger point towards the end when I thought, ah! I think I know what is going on here and earmarked one character as the bad guy. I am pleased that within the mountain of information thrown at the reader, I was able to spot the 2 vital clues and identify the bad guy!

All in all I think Close to Home is a GOOD 4 star read. It is not outstanding but is purely entertaining in the who-done-it sense of reading pleasure. I really liked that Cara used real locations in and around Oxford, where I spent some time in the 1980’s, rather than use fictional settings.

The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths.

The Dark Angel is the 10th novel in the Dr Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist, series of books. This time Ruth travels to the Liri Valley in Italy for a working holiday to look at some bones, meet up with an old friend, fellow archaeologist Dr Angelo Morelli and to spend time with her daughter Kate. Ruth also takes along her friend Shona, plus her son Louis.

The Dark Angel is like meeting up with old friends. The characters from previous Ruth Galloway novels are carried forward. This novel gave me a familiar warmth as the old characters made their way into the story. It gave me the same feeling I get when I watch Gogglebox on Channel 4 television. Real people whose characters you get so in tune with, you can imagine they are your own friends and family.

The Dark Angel is similar to the other Ruth Galloway novels. It is a character led mystery and NOT a gritty crime thriller. Oh, there is a murder later on in this story but that just adds to the mystery!

I found The Dark Angel to be a lovely, warm, entertaining read. I really enjoyed reading this book and I was very comfortable with all the characters. Elly strongly develops all of her characters and her story is very engaging indeed. I developed a relationship with her characters as though I was the fly on the wall. The emotions generated by the story is similar to that excellent long running drama series on ITV television called Cold Feet.

I liked how Elly wove the issue of housing mobility into her story. Her characters made their point of view about what it is like to move away from your original home into another region or country. The Dark Angel is a novel centered around relationships, relationships between people, the area where they live and the history of the local area.

I enjoyed reading The Dark Angel and I feel exactly the same about it as I did with books 8 and 9. Elly writes her novels really well, high quality and with a warmth that makes you feel part of the story. As with books 8 and 9, I consider The Dark Angel to be a GOOD read and it gets 4 stars from me. I now feel like I have become a fan and you can count me in for book 11.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for giving me a copy of this book on the understanding that I provide an honest review.

Turn a Blind Eye by Vicky Newham.

Turn a Blind Eye is a police procedural set in the Tower Hamlets district of London. This is a debut novel and features DI Maya Rahman, who was born in Bangladesh. A school headmaster is murdered and Maya is on the hunt to find the killer.

I found this novel different to most police procedural crime thrillers. Although it is Maya’s day job to catch the killer, most of this story is focused on the politics of school governance. It will appeal to readers of the Guardian newspaper but I found the droning on about diversity and minority ethnic groups rather dull. I think Vicky overplayed the race card in her novel. Exploring at great length her mother’s use of the regional language of Sylheti quickly became a bore.

The characterization of Maya is good but the focus of the story gets confused when a number of chapters are from the point of view of the teacher who found the dead headmaster. This interrupts the flow of the story and reduced my enjoyment of this book.

The plot was okay but somewhat unrealistic. It was regular “lets point the finger at every character” as they all could have a motive. The police investigation was routine with no surprises. There was the usual obsession with computers, mobile devices and social media.

I think Turn a Blind Eye is an okay, 3 star read. It has a social message but is not an entertaining or thrilling read. It was like spending the day at the Labour Party conference, although Jeremy Corbyn tells a far better tale than Vicky Newham. For lovers of regular crime fiction, Turn a Blind Eye is a disappointment. I feel that Vicky has exaggerated the differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds living in London and that irritated me as her story went on. But it does give you something to ponder, rather than the hunt for the killer.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Harlequin UK/Harper Collins for giving me a copy of this book on the understanding that I provide an honest review.