A Cold Heart by Doug SinclairMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
A small crime with potentially deadly consequences. Elizabeth Dunn is a care worker with a husband suffering from MS and a daughter with mental health issues. When she discovers her daughter is being bullied by the rich girls at her school for not having the latest designer jumper, Elizabeth will stop at nothing to help her daughter, even if it means shoplifting a £300 jumper.
Unfortunately, a security guard sees Elizabeth and chases after her, straight into traffic where he is hit by a car, with fatal consequences. Elizabeth scurries off into the night bumping into DS Malkie McCulloch on her way, he was on the way to meet his twenty-six year old daughter Jennifer for the first time until the RTA derailed his plans.
Although full of guilt, Elizabeth is happy to have made her daughter smile, until it transpires that the dead security guard was a member of the notorious Jessop family and Elizabeth is abducted from her home in broad daylight.
Can Malkie and his team find Elizabeth before Stevie Jessop returns to Scotland to extract his revenge?
Over and above the mystery we also have the overreaching arcs of Steph's rapist sperm donor and drug pushing step father (luckily Doug has toned down her constant harping on about it), Malkie's romance with the wounded former pilot Deborah, and the investigation into his mother's death, which Malkie now believes was murder, as well as Malkie meeting his daughter for the first time. TBH, I think these four overarching arcs are too much, at least one of them needs to fade away quickly because they detract from the current mystery in each book.
As always, this is on the high side of violence in what I like in my detective stories (ie one below serial killer in terms of violence and gore), I tend more towards the procedural and cosy but for others this is probably just right.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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