Thank you to the author, publisher Little, Brown, and online book club The Pigeonhole for the chance to read this. This is an honest and voluntary review. 

 

Everything in Tom Thorne’s life seems to be going well. He has a girlfriend who understands his work demands, friends who are loyal through even the hardest trials, and interesting cases to investigate. But, as his past comes back to haunt him everything is put at risk and Tom has to decide how far he’ll go to protect what he has.

 

I’m always impressed by how Tom Thorne manages to avoid, sometimes narrowly, the trope of the grumpy down-beaten loner detective. The author writes him in a really believable and engaging way, and whenever he gets too introspective a night watching the football with his best pal and local pathologist Phil Hendricks stops him from wallowing.

 

This means that what Tom goes through we go through with him, and The Murder Book is a particularly bumpy ride. What seems like an interesting, but relatively straightforward case soon leads to hidden depths and an ending that is likely to reverberate through future books.

 

While it helps to have read previous books in the series. It’s not essential. The backstory you need is delivered subtly and cleverly so that newbies find out what they need to know about the stories which feed into this one, and diehard fans don’t feel patronised. A great book.