Woman with a Secret

May 18, 2015
The murder of outspoken newspaper columnist Damon Blundy jump-starts Hannah’s convoluted ninth mystery featuring married British cops Simon Waterhouse and Charlotte “Charlie” Zailer (after The Carrier). Nicki Clements, a mother of two and a less-than-faithful wife who has recently moved from London to rural Spilling, carried on an online affair with a man she believes is Blundy (neither used real names). Clements attracts the attention of Waterhouse’s team when she speeds away from Blundy’s house, where the police have stopped traffic, outside Spilling. Waterhouse, who has become less likable as the series progresses, is obsessed with the message scrawled near Blundy’s body—“he is no less dead”—as well as the oddly staged murder scene. Waterhouse sifts through Blundy’s detractors, from a former British MP and potential lover to a disgraced sprinter, and Clements’s life slowly unravels. In the end, readers will struggle to care about any of these characters or their so-called secrets.

March 15, 2015

With traffic stopped on Elmhirst Road as the police conduct a search following the murder of controversy-sparking columnist Damon Blundy, Nicki Clements does a speedy U-turn; the cop in charge is not someone she wants to encounter. She's tracked down and questioned anyway, but her secret has nothing to do with the victim. A stand-alone from the author of the "Waterhouse and Zailer" series and the The Monogram Murders, the first Hercule Poirot mystery authorized by the Agatha Christie Estate.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
Nicki Clements' secret lands her smack in the middle of a murder case. The married mother of two has been in a cyber affair with a man she understood to be bombastic newspaper columnist Damon Blundy, even relocating her family from London to the suburbs to be near him. When Blundy is killedhis breathing smothered with tape and a knife stuck over his mouthNicki's suspicious movements attract police attention. Although she's soon eliminated as a suspect, she's still a key to the investigation, as DC Simon Waterhouse, his wife DS Charlie Zailer, and colleagues consider persons potentially motivated to kill Blundy after waging online battles with him, including former MP Paula Riddiough. But lies beget lies (and Nicki is a longtime and skilled liar) and secrets beget secrets, giving the intuitive Waterhouse a lot to figure out. In this ninth entry in the Waterhouse-Zailer series, Hannah focuses on fantasy versus reality and the part the cyber world plays in this dichotomy. Another intriguing, suspenseful psychological police procedural from a writer who's becoming a master of the genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2015

Hannah joins the unreliable narrator(s) club with this title, the ranks of which have swelled since the runaway success of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, and countless other psychological suspense novels that often feature females in trouble. Unfortunately, the latest in the author's "Waterhouse & Zailer" series (after The Carrier and Kind of Cruel) is not as strong as the aforementioned titles. Nicki Clements goes to great lengths to avoid a police blockade in her English suburban neighborhood, and that makes her a person of interest in the murder of a vituperative columnist, Damon Blundy, who lived near Nicki and her family. When she's called in for questioning by the cops, she lies wildly, as she has all her life, about everything. But is she guilty of the bizarre murder? DC Simon Waterhouse and his colleagues, including his wife, Sgt. Charlie Zailer, sort through the very long suspect list to find out. VERDICT Readers who follow the author's police procedural series will clamor for this one, and anybody who enjoyed Hannah's Agatha Christie estate-sanctioned Hercule Poirot mystery, The Monogram Murders, may want to take a gamble. However, readers looking for complex, relatable characters and/or a believable plot will be disappointed. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]--Liz French, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.