Helen Fields has recently added two new titles to her Scotland-based police procedural series that began with Perfect Remains and continued with Perfect Prey and Perfect Death.
Perfect Silence gets off to a gruesome start. When the body of a young girl is found, pathologists are called in and discover that a doll has been carved from the victim’s skin. Soon, another victim is found and it looks like there will be more unless DCI Ava Turner and DI Luc Callanach can get to the bottom of what is going on.
Perfect Silence is the fourth title in the Helen Fields Scotland-based police procedural series. Hot on its heels comes the fifth, Perfect Crime which opens with a 30-something year-old man about to jump off a bridge. Stephen Berry is talked down by suicide prevention counsellor Rune McClure but within days Stephen is found dead, having apparently fallen from a castle at the top of a cliff. Before long, DI Luc Callanach and DCI Ava Turner are on the case, trying to discover whether the death was suicide or something more sinister. When further apparent suicides follow, things begin to look very murky.
What I liked most about Perfect Crime is how Helen Fields is developing the characters of some of the police officers that Callanach and Turner work — Lively, Overbeck and Tripp in particular. The relationship between Callanach and Turner also moves forward in Perfect Crime although perhaps not in an entirely believable way. I thought there was perhaps too much crammed into the ending of Perfect Crime and that it took away from what was otherwise a good read. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the next instalment in this series.
[Disclosure: I read an advance copy of Perfect Crime via Netgalley]