The woman’s bright blonde hair floats in the breeze. She almost looks like she could be resting on the soft green grass. But her brown eyes stare unblinking up at the sky, and the final cut across her mouth is dark with blood. Her words silenced forever…
Late one evening, as the final church bell rings out, Sandra Deakin’s cold and lifeless body is found in the overgrown graveyard with multiple stab wounds. When Detective Kim Stone rushes to the scene, the violence of the attack convinces her that this murder was deeply personal. What could have caused such hate?
As the team dig into Sandra’s life, they discover she believed she could communicate with the dead. Was that why she was targeted? The last people to see her alive were a group of women who had a session with her the night before she was killed, and as Kim and her team pay them a visit, they soon learn each of the women is lying about why they wanted Sandra’s help…
Kim realises she must dig deep and open her mind to every avenue if she’s going to stand a chance at solving this case. And when she learns that Sandra was banned from the church grounds and had been receiving death threats too, she’s ever more certain that Sandra’s gifts are at the heart of everything.
But just when she thinks she’s found a lead, the broken body of a nineteen-year-old boy is found outside a call centre – a single slash across his mouth just like Sandra’s. Kim knows they are now racing against time to understand what triggered these attacks, and to stop a twisted killer.
But they might be too late. Just as Kim sits down at a local psychic show she discovers something that makes her blood run cold. Both Sandra and the call centre were named in an article about frauds. And this show stars the next name on the list. She looks around the audience with a feeling of utter dread, certain the killer is among them…SYNOPSIS: When a nineteen-year-old boy, Jamie Mills, is found hanging from a tree in a local park, his death is ruled a suicide. Detective Kim Stone’s instincts tell her something isn’t right. Why, when his mother is told, does she not break down in tears? And how could Jamie have climbed the tree with a recent injury?
Kim should be easing back into work gently after a harrowing case left her body and mind broken, but quickly taking charge of her team, Kim is shocked to learn that Jamie’s parents had sent him to a clinic to ‘cure’ him of his sexuality.
The clues to smashing open this disturbing case lie behind the old Victorian walls of the clinic, run by the Gardner family. They claim that patients come of their own accord and are free to leave at any time. But why are those who attended the clinic so afraid to speak of what happens there? And where did the faded restraint marks on Jamie’s wrists come from?
Kim makes a further chilling discovery – the head of the clinic, Celia Gardner, was sent there for conversion therapy when she was sixteen.
Then the body of a young woman is found dead by suffocation, her death also staged to look like a suicide.
Scarred from a previous case that nearly took her life, can Kim unearth the dark secrets within the Gardner family and is she strong enough to stop a terrifying killer silencing the clinic’s previous patients one by one?
Kat’s Rating: 5/5
My Review: Back with the team that Kim Stone runs is like going back home for a visit. Bryant her ever solid right hand man, Penn and Stacey and a murder case takes us right back into the heart of their lives. Sandra Deakin is found dead in a horrific manner and the team learn that she was a reasonably well known psychic. They need to work out if her job played apart in her death, and who would commit such a horrendous attack.
The fact that the murder victim was a psychic plays a key part in this book and it unravels a lot of personal feelings among the team as they each try to determine their personal views on psychics. In addition to the first murder, Kim also wants to learn more about the death of the homeless John Doe. Stacey ends up running a lot of background for the Sandy murder and in turn ends up crossing paths with somebody that I think her life difficult!
The team work tirelessly and as usual they end up with a result, and not one I entirely saw coming. As usual these books are so well plotted, packed full of threads and characters that you love. I am thrilled that this series shows no signs of slowing down even after book 18! I particularly liked the ending of this book and cannot wait to see how things pan out in the next one.
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