Stop Dead by Leigh RussellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Time Taken to Read - 4 days
Publisher - No Exit Press
Blurb from back cover
When a successful businessman is brutally murdered, the police suspect his glamorous wife and her young lover. But when the victim's business partner suffers the same gruesome fate, and yet another body is discovered, seemingly unrelated to the first two, the police are baffled. The only clue is DNA that leads them to two women: one dead, the other in prison. With a steady stream of bodies arriving at the morgue, can DI Geraldine Steel find the killer before the killer stages another deadly attack?
My Review
I never comment on covers as they are not a big part in my choosing process however I must pass comment on this one. The actual cover itself is made from high quality, almost feels like, laminate of some kind. Smooth, shiny and made up of dark greens with bold red writing, the books title. The back cover is of lighter colour with black and red text and 4 small pictures of the previous books.
This is book number five in the series, this is my first time reading this author and you can easily pick this up as a one off. Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel is our main character investigating the brutal murder of a local businessman in London. Suspicion falls upon his widow and her young lover, before another another body is found with the same gruesome mutilations. The clock is ticking for D.I. Steel to solve the case and stop the murderer before they kill anyone else.
I quite enjoyed this story, the action starts from the opening chapter and the body count goes from there. I felt the pace slowed down at some parts and some of the storyline was a bit of padding. For example something from Geraldine's family is revealed in this book and she ponders on it briefly in different sections of the book however nothing really comes of it.
The investigation casts out a few suspects and I thought early on I had it worked out, I was wrong. Your kept guessing up to the end and the story goes from slow and plodding along to full swing all is revealed. This is a great book to read when you find your struggling or have a lot on as everything is explained, what they say, why they say it and of course the how and why of the crime at the end. Thanks so much to RealReaders for introducing me to a new author and supplying me with this ARC. I think I may go back and read the earlier books to connect better with the characters. This book will be available from 30th of May, 2013 from all good retailers.
I know just what you mean about the cover as there seems to be a lot of these books with this type of covering around. I've even had one or two books recently in which the pages themselves have this very smooth, laminated feel to them.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, great review. Thanks for the recommendation.
where there's murder, there's me.. well, as a reader of course!
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