Lethal Game by Charlie Gallagher

I would like to thank Avon for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Avon

Published – Out Now

Price - £8.99 paperback £0:99 Kindle eBook

He knows your name. Where you live. The car you drive.

If you don’t play, your family will die. If you lose, you will.

When DI Joel Norris and DS Lucy Rose begin investigating the death of a young woman, murdered on a quiet country lane, they can’t imagine what lies ahead.

This killer uses his victims like chess pieces in a life-sized contest, with the highest stakes imaginable.

Now Norris and Rose are pawns at the mercy of a twisted rulebook.

Can they beat him at his own game before the next round begins and more innocent lives are taken?

I’d not read the first instalment in this series but pleasingly Gallagher gives new readers just enough background to explain where the central characters are in the lives and careers that this was not an issue. The opening is terrifying watching two women we don’t know in a battle for their lives, and we can feel from the start an oppressive horror which the team of DI Joel Norris and DS Lucy Rose need to stop before more harm is done. It an intriguing mystery and juxtaposed with the countryside of Kent made more unusual and disconcerting.

This is very much a procedural and you get a lot of explanations for procedures and team dynamics that support an investigation and these scenes plus the way witnesses and suspects are talked to is all very much with a feel of an author very much giving the tale a feel of reality. Norris is a maverick trying to be now a team leader and Rose is learning to trust him with her life and secrets. This very much felt a story where the two leads are now learning to settle and work with each other with still moments of tension.

For me it never really clicked aa read though and that was not the fault of the writing but just a story I found myself never clicking in its entirety. People placed in deadly traps felt a little closer to a type of horror I don’t enjoy and finding it in a thriller didn’t make that feeling any better. A solid police procedural those who enjoy action and twisting turns should enjoy.