Five years ago, when I read book six in the Maeve Kerrigan series, I confidently stated that this was a series I had managed to keep up with. Famous last words as I've only just got around to reading book seven, Let the Dead Speak, and I do wish I'd got to it sooner. As always, it was great to be back with Maeve and DI Josh Derwent (in my opinion one of the best creations in fiction).

Events from the earlier books are hinted at and I would have loved some kind of recap as things were hazily coming back to me. However, this book can be read as a standalone (although you would miss the background between Maeve and Josh). Maeve has had a promotion to DS and with it comes a greater confidence in her abilities. When a woman goes missing, her house covered in her blood, the team have to try and not only find out what happened but where she is as well. This leads to a number of suspects in the same street and it's not a straightforward case by any means.

I found this to be a fast-paced crime thriller that really kept me turning the pages. The strength of the series as a whole is the dynamic between Kerrigan and Derwent and it's here in abundance once again, albeit with a change in circumstances for Derwent which seems to have softened his edges somewhat. There is also a complex and intriguing plot which gives Maeve a chance to step forward and shine. This is not my favourite of the series so far but I enjoyed it very much indeed and hope not to leave it quite so long before I catch up with the next instalment. ( )

I'll continue the series ( )

An arresting premise and a plot that lives up to it.

For a complete review please click on the link below:

http://onerightword.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/let-dead-speak-jane-casey.html ( )

Let The Dead Speak is the seventh novel in the Maeve Kerrigan crime series, which is one of my favorites.

Maeve Kerrigan is on a homicide team in London, one of only a few woman. She mostly works with Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, with whom she has a complicated and interesting relationship. Josh is attractive and apparently irresistible to women. Although he and Maeve spar repeatedly, Maeve knows Josh would defend her with his life, without question. But she is prickly about taking care of herself, whether or not she always can. Trying to figure out how they really feel about each other is one of the appealing aspects of the series.

In this installment, Maeve has been promoted to Detective Sergeant. A new woman, Georgia Shaw, has been assigned to the team as Detective Constable, and Maeve takes a dislike to her. Maeve thinks Georgia was hired to fill a quota and didn’t deserve to be on a murder investigation team. But she feels guilty for thinking that: “…that was exactly how the other members of the team had felt about me when I joined.”

They are called to the scene of what looks like a gruesome murder at the flat of Kate Emery. Kate’s 18-year-old daughter Chloe encountered the bloodbath when she unexpectedly returned early from a visit with her father and stepmother. The only problem for the murder team is that there is no body.

Chloe goes across the street to stay with the neighbors, the Norris family, who are active in the Church of the Modern Apostles, an evangelical charismatic church. They never approved of Kate, nor of Chloe, but the mother, Eleanor, feels harboring Chloe is the “Christian” thing to do. In addition, Chloe is friends with the Norris’s daughter Bethany.

The father, Oliver Norris, insists Maeve investigate a good-looking neighbor boy, William Turner, who was accused of a stabbing some years earlier, but was exonerated. Turner, in Norris's opinion, pays too much attention to the girls on the block, making him a potential sinner.

Developments in the personal lives of Maeve and Josh are interwoven into the story. Josh wants to quit because the job is interfering in his new relationship with his girlfriend Melissa and her four-year-old son Thomas. He moved in with them, but Melissa doesn’t like his job:

“‘The hours. The stress. The fact that I don’t talk to her about what we do. She says I shut her out.’ He glanced across at me. ‘She’s right. It’s deliberate.’”

He’s not only protecting her; he’s protecting himself. “I don’t want her to know about the things I think about.”

Maeve reminds him “You wanted to be with Melissa because she was the light in the darkness.” But Maeve is worried for him. She muses:

“[Melissa] loved what he did and who he was, I was sure of that. And then she ran up against the reality of his job. He wouldn’t be easy company to live with, whether you understood him or not, but she couldn’t understand him the way I did. I saw what he saw. I heard what he heard. She couldn’t begin to guess why he came home snappy and withdrawn, or why he was short with her now and then.

But you couldn’t change him. You’d destroy everything that was good in him if you tried to make him into something docile and peaceful. She’d kill their chance of being happy together unless she accepted him for what he was.”

Maeve has problems of her own. It has been a year since her boyfriend Rob left without so much as a good-bye. She is lonely, and can’t help wishing Rob would somehow decide to come back to her. (No one else hopes this; as Josh pointed out in the previous book, “he raped you, he lied to you, and then he cheated on you.” But as is sometimes the case with victims of domestic violence for complicated reasons, Maeve made excuses for Rob, and still wanted to be with him.)

Meanwhile, the team finds out more and more strange things about both Kate and her neighbors, and finally a body is found, but it is not Kate’s.

Unraveling the twists and turns of the plot keep the reader glued to the pages.

Evaluation: Casey held my attention throughout, as she always does. I love her recurring characters, and can’t wait to see what happens to members of the team next. ( )

LET THE DEAD SPEAK is the 7th novel in the Maeve Kerrigan series. A sobering thought for me given how much I liked this character in book number 1 and yet still I've now managed to miss books 2 through 6. Which means I can definitely say even if you've never read any of this series, LET THE DEAD SPEAK will work well.

A police procedural in style, LET THE DEAD SPEAK relies heavily on character interaction between Kerrigan and the team that she works with. There are a few tensions dotted throughout which are mostly self-explanatory, in particular there's obviously some clouds over Kerrigan from the recent past. When eighteen-year-old Chloe Emery's mother disappears, leaving behind signs of a bloody struggle, the entire team are baffled by the missing body. Despite that tension between within the team, they do manage to stay focused on the investigation that leads them to some dodgy neighbours and some very odd outcomes.

The plot here is an interesting undertaking with some elements that are going to be easy to pick, and much that remains unclear right until the end. Without a body, Kerrigan and her team are forced to focus on the possible why's of Kate Emery's fate, rather than the how or who up front, meaning this is a good old fashioned investigation in many ways, working each lead as it appears, weeding out a wide range of red herrings and possible suspects by coming to understand the victim, her family, and the immediate neighbours.

The use of first person narrative by Kerrigan works well here, giving the reader an inside view on the frustrations, achievements and feelings around an investigation like this. Peppered as it is with acerbic humour and plenty of barbs and cracks from colleagues, the perspective creates an immediacy and realism that wouldn't necessarily work as well with a more observational style.

About the only thing that readers who are new to this series might notice is that there is obviously back-story to Kerrigan's recent promotion, and her relationship with DI Josh Derwent - that alone should be enough of a reason to plug the gaps in reading the series, but it really shouldn't stop anybody from starting with LET THE DEAD SPEAK if that's the best option available. A series definitely worth reading whatever order you opt for.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-let-dead-speak-jane-casey ( )