Mari Hannah and Settled Blood

Mari Hannah's second book Settled Blood won the Northern Writers' Award in 2010 before it was even sold in the UK.

The first paragraph intrigued before it had ended.

Hannah carries on from the Murder Wall with her detectives, led by DCI Kate Daniels, driving the story on and this is a strong part of the writing for me. Her concentration on personal relationships within the MIT (yes she does annoyingly use abbreviations, but thankfully not that many and jargon is non-existent) is what makes this book so interesting. She builds her characters into the readers imagination to make them owned by the reader. You can love them, empathise with them, let them irritate you or loath them. Not even good people are perfect as you will see. She sets her detectives way above the rest and makes disparaging remarks about the uniform plods. Sometimes she does show a degree of kindness towards them but 'a bunch of uniforms' is not being that generous.

Okay there is a dead body and the killer to be found. There is the climate and the location set close to Hadrian's Wall to be dealt with. It is all in there. The suspense; the urgency, the frustrations of delays and the weather as the search continues.

About halfway through I found that it was less about crime and more about Kate's ability, personal relationships, and her squad members and so it is, but superbly done. Then eventually we get there the killer is found and the other threads in this story are unravelled and the final search is finalised. Seemingly a miracle and we have an ending that works, but only just.

This is an excellent second book after the Murder Wall and now I can read her third book Deadly Deceit.