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| ★★★★✰ |
Synopsis: The Burning Man. It's the name the media has given a brutal murderer who has beaten four young women to death before setting their bodies ablaze in secluded areas of London's parks. And now there's a fifth. Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious detective constable, keen to make her mark on the murder task force. Her male colleagues believe Maeve's empathy makes her weak, but the more she learns about the latest victim, Rebecca Haworth, from her grieving friends and family, the more determined Maeve becomes to bring her murderer to justice. But how do you catch a killer no one has seen when so much of the evidence has gone up in smoke?
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Review: As part of my foray into the world of thriller series, I picked up this book as it was only £1.99 for Kindle, and my attention had previously been drawn by a review of a later installment in the series. There are seven books in this series - the longest published series I've begun - and as such I'm very pleased to say I enjoyed it thoroughly.
I'm becoming a bit more familiar with the ranks of British police and detectives, and find a lot of police-perspective thrillers are told from the perspective of a high up, like the DCI Matilda Darke series. The Burning, however, featuring DC Maeve Kerrigan, features a low-level dectective, ambitiously working her hardest and professionally sparring with her colleagues for the recognition of the higher-ups. The case she is working on, that of the Burning Man serial killer, is really interesting. The novel starts off with a bang, which immediately captured my interest. While it levels out to a more subdued tone overall by not focusing so much on the serial killer, it remains compelling by focusing on finding out all about Rebecca Haworth, her past, and the people who knew her best.
I really liked all the characters, the good guys, the bad guys, and enjoyed trying to figure out whodunnit through a set of unreliable narrators. A good combination of police procedural and psychological thrillers with solid characters and a really interesting story, this is a solid first entry in the Maeve Kerrigan series. I've heard that it takes two or three books for this series to really get going, so I'm looking forward reading more/
Rating: 4/5
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