Angela Marsons

An edge of your seat serial killer thriller

Silent Scream

Denaiir

Kim Stone is an amazing character and the narration is outstanding

Five figures gather round a shallow grave. They had all taken turns to dig. An adult-sized hole would have taken longer. An innocent life had been taken, but the pact had been made. Their secrets would be buried, bound in blood . . . Years later, a headmistress is found brutally strangled, the first in a spate of gruesome murders which shock the Black Country. But when human remains are discovered at a former children's home, disturbing secrets are also unearthed. D.I. Kim Stone fast realizes she's on the hunt for a twisted individual whose killing spree spans decades. As the body count rises, Kim needs to stop the murderer before they strike again. But to catch the killer, can Kim confront the demons of her own past before it's too late? Fans of Rachel Abbott, Val McDermid, and Mark Billingham will be gripped by this exceptional new voice in British crime fiction.

Pretty good procedural, I really enjoyed following the whole team and the plot was good, I'll definitely continue this series

Nem tetszett, hogy két külön gyilkos volt! Meg egyikőjük története sem túl eredeti. Mindenesetre került benne jó néhány olyan csavar amire nem számítottam és megfogott benne.

Vas Petra

Angela Guilherme

*I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

“Silent Scream” doesn't start as a compulsive reading. On the contrary, there is too much going on at once, too many characters from the present and from the past being introduced, and that we sense are connected somehow, and it becomes necessary (at least for me it was) to slow down the reading and try to assimilate all the information. Eventually all the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit and make sense and then it becomes complicated to drop the book because we really want to know how it all ends…

The story begins with a scene from the past, where five people are digging a grave in turns, and we are told the grave is not big enough for an adult. The story then advances 10 years and we see a woman get killed in her own home. The person responsible for the investigation is Kim Stone, a character I didn't find very easy to like in the beginning. Kim appears to be rough and to have a total lack of social skills but the truth is, as the story progresses and we get to know her better, we can understand why she is the way she is and also that there is more to her than meets the eye.

After a second assassination and a possible third, Kim and her team get to the conclusion that the only thing the victims have in common is the fact that they all worked, at the same time, at the same children’s home, now closed and in ruins. And when the dog of the professor who intended on conducting excavations on the land adjacent to the children’s home turns up dead, it seems obvious that someone doesn't want the past stirred.

And that convinces Kim that there is something buried at the children’s home and, as the land gets probed, bodies show up, and they are identified as children thought to have escaped from the home. The details of their deaths, revealed in the autopsies, are gruesome and there seems to only be one possible explanation: there was a serial killer amongst the children’s home employees and he or she is now eliminating his/hers former colleagues to cover his/hers tracks.

As more former workers from the home are murdered, and the list of potential killers gets shorter, it wasn't hard to identify the killer, but I confess to not expecting the final twist. It left me completely dumbfounded…

As I mentioned before, even though I didn't like the protagonist at first, she grew on me. The way she identifies with the victims and doesn't look to the means to get to the ends to bring them justice (which gets her in trouble with her boss more times than it should) and the fact that she is a complex character, with many layers, left me curious to know how she will evolve on the next book. And I hope the new friend she made and the potential future love interest she met will make an appearance…

To sum it up, it was a pleasurable reading, even though it was dense and hard to keep up with at the beginning. But now that we already had a glimpse of the characters and we already know them a little bit, I think it will be easier to get into the story of the next book. I can hardly wait!

Lynn Braden

Kim and her team's next case involves an abandoned state run facility called Crestwood where kids and teens were sent who had been removed from their homes for a variety of reasons. This hits close to home since Kim spent a great deal of time in places like this one during her childhood. When an archaeological dig is planned in a field near Crestwood, evidence is found that bodies of some of the children had been buried there. Kim's team investigates the personnel who worked at the facility as they are being murdered one by one. 

Silent Scream does a good job of connecting the present-day murders of the personnel from the facility to the murders of the children in the past. Throughout the novel, the murderer speaks to the reader through the use of italicized print, and that is how we find out what happened to the missing girls. The actual culprit is a little bit predictable, but overall this is a good mystery and serves as the basis for this series.

Silent Scream An edge of your seat serial killer thriller

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