20/20 by Carl Goodman - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for 20/20 by Carl Goodman. If you've never been here before, please do click around and read my other reviews. I often read crime novels - seems to be a 2021 theme - so there's plenty to go at. 

I was intrigued by the premise of this story so signed up for the blog tour. The blurb reads as below:

Can you see a killer before it’s too late?

On the first day of her new job, D.I. Eva Harris is called to the scene of a brutal murder at the heart of Surrey society. A shocking crime by a meticulous killer – who escaped with the victim’s eyes.

With the body drained of blood and no forensic evidence left at the scene, Harris’ efforts to find the killer becomes desperate. But as her investigation is complicated by corruption at the heart of the police, she doesn’t know who to trust on her own team.

As the pressure mounts, Eva realises the murder is even more horrific than it seems, and her own dreadful history threatens to be drawn out with it…

A dark and compulsive detective novel, for fans of Chris Carter and M.W Craven.

So yes, Eva turns up for her first day at work, needing to do several things. She needs to impress her boss, Sutton, who isn't too happy to have such a young DI in her team, and her underlings - Jamie, Raj, and Becks. She manages to do this latter one quite well, which I really liked. She is also doing something that the reader isn't certain of to begin with. There's a senior officer called Hadley who has Eva in his pocket, because he knows her secrets. He wants to know who in her station is telling secrets to a drug kingpin in Eastern Europe. However, Eva is determined to get out from under him, which is a strong thread of the novel. 

Anyway, back to the murders. The first one, Irina Stepanov, is brutal and forensic. There's almost no evidence to show who could have done this. Eva and a uniformed officer go to try to look for the killer, and end up having a stand off with him in what is the first of several attempts on Eva's life throughout the book. The murdered woman had her eyes removed, and there are links in that with the murders of three students several years ago, which remain unsolved. 

Another woman is murdered, and the detectives go back over the suspects from the previous case. However Eva is convinced that the two cases are separated. She needs to convince Sutton of that, though. Then a third body is found - this time belonging to a middle aged man, someone in quite a different demographic to the previous two victims. What is the link between the three? Eva gets an anonymous text message which starts off a chain of events to find the link and expose the killer.

This is quite a gritty and gory book, which I personally liked, but I know others may feel differently to me. I felt like there was a bit too much middle, but I'm not sure what I could have cut. I also felt some of the characters' names were too similar to others - there's Harris, Hadley, and Harred, for example - which confused me at times. But I liked Eva and wanted her to survive and succeed. I would read something else with her as DI, especially in her work on cybercrime, and I'm giving this four and a half out of five! 

This is Carl's first book and I think it's great for a debut. Here's his bio:

Carl Goodman is from Surrey and 20/20 is his first crime thriller. It introduces Eva Harris, a newly promoted DI with a computer science background, thrown in at the deep end with an especially gruesome murder. Carl likes hard-hitting, contemporary stories with dark and unusual themes and is currently working on more DI Eva Harris novels.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Carl201010