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A Patient Fury by Sarah Ward - Review

Friday, February 28, 2020

When I read the fourth book in this series a couple of weeks ago, I realised, as I said, that I hadn't read the third one. I had it on my shelves but hadn't got around to it. I really like the series, so I wanted to complete it. I had picked up two other books but couldn't get into them, for one reason or another. I will definitely come back to them both - one of them is March's book club book so I'll have to read it if I want to attend the meeting, and the other was Call Down the Hawk which I obviously want to read because I love the Raven Cycle! I'm thinking actually that I might take that on holiday at the end of April so that I've got time to properly concentrate on it.

So anyway, I went back to the DC Connie Childs books because I knew it would be pretty easy reading and I was having a busy couple of weeks and needed something I didn't need to put much effort into. Crime novels are perfect for that for me. And indeed, I read this really fast, hardly able to put it down.

I will say that I think it's the worst of the four books so far. I can't really say why, but it felt incomplete to me at the end. However, I still really liked it, so it's not like it's a terrible book.

Sadler is called to a house fire in the early hours of a summer morning. The house is owned by Peter Winson, his much younger wife Francesca, and their son Charlie. All three die in the blaze. Sadler and Connie are shocked to find Francesca's body hanging from a fixture on the landing. Usually in cases like this, the man of the family kills the others and then himself, but here all signs point to Francesca having killed her husband and son before taking her own life.

Peter has two children, George and Julia, from his first marriage, who are now nearing fifty. The two of them react strangely to the news that their dad, stepmother, and half-brother are all dead. However, it transpires that their mother, Elizabeth, went missing in 1980 when they were children, and was never found.

Julia harbours some hope that her mother is still alive and spends time on internet forums posting messages for her mum. She works in a local cavern and lives alone with her dog Bosco. As the police investigation goes on, Julia becomes certain that someone is following her and standing outside her house. There's quite a lot of red herrings, some of which just went nowhere and which annoyed me, but one of which turns up a nice friendship that I enjoyed throughout the book.

Meanwhile, Connie refuses to accept the official versions of events and is convinced that the truth about Peter, Francesca, and Charlie's deaths are caught up in what happened in 1980. She starts digging into the past, against Sadler's instructions.

I did enjoy the mystery but as I say, it felt incomplete to me at the end. I didn't feel there was enough Sadler in this book, I would've liked more. However, I'm giving this three and a half out of five.


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