Murder At Home by Faith Martin
Publisher: Joffe Books
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Rating: 3 stars
Reviewed by FernLooking for a brilliant bestselling murder mystery with a feisty female detective?
Meet DI HILLARY GREENE, a policewoman struggling to save her career and catch criminals.
Flo Jenkins is found murdered in her armchair, a paperknife sticking out of her chest. The old woman was well liked and nothing seems to have been stolen from her home. And it was common knowledge that she only had weeks to live.
Why kill a dying woman? This is going to be one of the toughest cases yet for Hillary to solve.
Hillary also has to deal with a new colleague who has a terrible temper and a rocky past.
With no forensics, no leads, and only a drug-addict nephew as a suspect, will this be Hillary’s first failure to solve a murder case?
This is a crime mystery full of well-observed characters, which will have you gripped from start to finish.
DI Hillary Greene has a lot going on right now. With one member of her team about to get married and move to a different stations and already down a team member from a recent promotion Hillary is being kept rather busy. With a new relationship only a few months old and still in the getting-to-know-you phase and avoiding the clear intentions of her boss, DI Greene has a rather full life. So it’s almost a relief when she catches a new murder case – an elderly lady stabbed in her home. But with no clear motive and hardly anyone with a cross word about her, soon the case is yet another difficulty DI Greene has to try and get on top of.
I have been enjoying this series and was cautiously optimistic when there were quite a few changes shown in this book. I was pleased Hillary and Mike had finally moved forward – after circling each other for a number of books now – and while their relationship is still clearly in the early stages I was happy with some progress with this very slow moving sub-plot. Equally I was happy that a new character was introduced to replace Tommy – who moved stations at the end of the previous book and left a slot open on Hillary’s team. I’d be interested to see if another new character is introduced in the next book as another team member got married at the very end of this book (another long-running sub plot finally coming to a close).
I felt Kevin, the new character, was an interesting breath of fresh air in this story and so am interested to learn more about him in the coming few books. There also was a small sub plot revolving around him that was left open at the end of this book so I expect this will likely get followed up soon and that should prove interesting too.
I found this to be a well written and well paced British Police Procedural style of book and I really enjoyed it. I particularly liked how for the vast majority of the book there was no clear motive to the murder. While there were a few really good red herrings and leads followed through much of the mystery came from trying to unravel the old dear’s life and work out why on earth anyone would want her dead. This was certainly a different perspective on the usual who-dun-it style of story and I actually found it quite refreshing. I also feel it left plenty of time and space for all the other sub-plots and character arc to really flourish and get some good mileage.
I definitely feel readers can pick this book up by itself and enjoy it – but must admit there’s a fair amount of progress with a number of longer-running character arcs so it might be felt that some knowledge of the previous books might give the reader a deeper emotional connection and interest in all these sub-plots going on. I feel the actual mystery itself is very well contained and explained in this novel but a deeper appreciation might be had by readers who know a lot of the history between the main characters and team
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