Fog creeps up the Solent and into the city from the sea, casting a shroud over the streets, driving the population indoors at the end of the day and pulling the streetwalkers out into their night domain. Empty backstreets, dirty abandoned industrial estates, overgrown riverbanks. Murder will take place this night.

This is a great follow-up by Matthew Arlidge to his first novel about Detective Inspector Helen Grace, but please read Eeny Meeny first or you will be a bit baffled by the back story. These two books tick a lot of boxes: gritty realistic drama, lead female detective with a raw damaged personality, in fact a lot of female characters, set in Southampton [not London, not Edinburgh] with flawed heroes and damaged villains. Arlidge [below]is an accomplished TV writer and author; whether he is writing about police procedure, or the nasty druggy backstreets of a port city where the population rises and falls with the tide, I believe him.

The murder scenes are graphic and anatomical, a bit too much for me, so I admit to skipping a few paragraphs. I don’t like blood and gore, but I do like Helen Grace and DC Charlie Brooks. I didn’t take to Emilia Garanita , the reporter from the local paper, or the new Detective Superintendant Ceri Harwood. Woven through the chase to find the hooker who kills her victims are stories continued from Eeny Meeny: why is Helen Grace driving to Aldershot to spy on a boy, what happened to Helen’s sister, can Charlie have a baby and stay in the force, and how does Garanita always know where Grace is?

Helen Grace’s story will run and run, I am sure there will be a third book.

To find out why Matthew Arlidge likes the bad guys, click here to read an article for the WH Smith Richard and Judy Book Club.
To find out why I liked the first book about DI Helen Grace, Eeny Meeny, click here.

‘Pop goes the Weasel’ by MJ Arlidge [published in the UK on September 11, 2014 by Penguin]