Talking To The Dead By Harry Bingham – Book Review #4
I’ve bought lots of books from the charity shop after reading the blurb on the back. I get annoyed when it doesn’t mention anywhere that the book is part of a series.
Luckily, Talking To The Dead turned out to be the first book in this series.
I’ve got about 4 books (that I know of so far) that are books from the middle of a series. I now have to collect the series if I want to read those books!
I’ve learnt my lesson now. I’ll Google each book before I buy it to make sure it isn’t part of a series.
Talking To The Dead
Here’s the blurb from Goodreads:
SHE KNOWS WHAT IT’S LIKE. . . .
At first, the murder scene appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her. But then detectives find a strange piece of evidence in the squalid house: the platinum credit card of a very wealthy–and long dead–steel tycoon. What is a heroin-addicted hooker doing with the credit card of a well-known and powerful man who died months ago? This is the question that the most junior member of the investigative team, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, is assigned to answer.
But D.C. Griffiths is no ordinary cop. She’s earned a reputation at police headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, for being odd, for not picking up on social cues, for being a little overintense. And there’s that gap in her past, the two-year hiatus that everyone assumes was a breakdown. But Fiona is a crack investigator, quick and intuitive. She is immediately drawn to the crime scene, and to the tragic face of the six-year-old girl, who she is certain has something to tell her . . . something that will break the case wide open.
Ignoring orders and protocol, Fiona begins to explore far beyond the rich man’s credit card and into the secrets of her seaside city. And when she uncovers another dead prostitute, Fiona knows that she’s only begun to scratch the surface of a dark world of crime and murder. But the deeper she digs, the more danger she risks–not just from criminals and killers but from her own past . . . and the abyss that threatens to pull her back at any time.
My Thoughts
I was really looking forward to reading this book but I have to say I was very disappointed.
The blurb on the back says:
A detective with a disconcerting familiarity with corpses.
Listening to what the dead woman and her daughter are trying to tell her, and tracing the twisted path that led them to their deaths, quickly becomes an obsession for DC Fiona Griffiths. But searching for the truth wherever it leads will mean taking a journey to the last place she wants to go.
Her past.
I took from this that she had a way of ‘talking with the dead’. This was further backed up, or so I thought when I read the end of chapter 1 where it says:
Matthews is talking about formalities and I’m blathering answers back at him, but my attention isn’t with any of that stuff. I’m going to be a policewoman. And just five years ago, I was dead.
I couldn’t wait to find out what she meant by this. It turned out I had to wait right until the end of the book and by that time, I wasn’t really bothered any more.
The book seemed to go on forever but I never really got sucked into the story. I was often confused about what was actually going on and it took so long to get answers to everything that I stopped caring.
At the end of the book, Fiona found out something about her past that I think was meant to make me want to go and buy the next book. I won’t be bothering.
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