Books Read: Into the Night by Sarah Bailey

Senior Detective Gemma Woodstock is a small-town policewoman working on the biggest homicide cases in Melbourne. When an up-and-coming movie star is stabbed to death while the cameras are rolling on his new blockbuster, Gemma, eager to prove herself, is assigned to the case.

With the whole thing caught from multiple angles, how hard can it be to catch the crazed culprit? And who would want to hurt Australia's adored boy-next-door? As Gemma uncovers the deadly underside of fame, her investigation turns into a dangerous game against those with money, power and everything to lose...

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I'd like to thank Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and Kate at Corvus Books for my ecopy of Into the Night to review.

Earlier this year I was introduced to the writing of Sarah Bailey when I was invited to review her debut novel The Dark Lake, you can read my review here, and now she's back with an excellent follow up and I'm pleased to see that Gemma Woodstock has returned.

As mentioned in my previous review Gemma is not a particularly likeable character, a complex unreliable narrator if you like, but yet there's also something so intriguing about her that makes you want to delve deeper into her as a character to see what makes her tick.  Why is she the way she is, and acts the way she does seemingly putting herself in danger at any moment?  In the previous book she had been living in her hometown of Smithson with her partner and young son but now she's living alone and working in Melbourne following a promotion.  So again internal questions were raised in my head wondering how could she as a mother leave her son behind even if her relationship had broken down?

Gemma and her colleagues are already investigating the random murder of a homeless man when they are assigned to a high-profile case involving the murder of a young up-and-coming actor on the set of a movie being filmed in the city streets.  Add into the mix a third high profile case that their team are involved in, it looks like resources are likely to be stretched to their absolute limits to finding the answers to solve one of these crimes, let alone all three.

Sarah Bailey has expertly managed to weave the various sub-plots effortlessly into one intriguing story, along with introducing us to a whole cast full of diverse, interesting characters with complicated backgrounds of their own.  It is left up to us as readers to try and filter out the red herrings that we come across, hang onto the various clues that are threaded throughout until we reach the dramatic conclusion when everything finally slots into place.

It was interesting to see the development of Gemma as a character throughout this novel so I'm hopeful that we'll get to see more of her again in the not too distant future as I don't think Sarah Bailey is done with her yet.  I think we're only scratching the surface at getting to know who the real Gemma is, I think there's still a lot more to discover both personally and professionally about her.

Into the Night was such a tense and absorbing read, from the moment I started reading I was so caught up with all the drama that was playing out that I devoured this book in just over 24 hours. I would have read it in a single sitting if I'd had the luxury of free time to do so as I wanted answers to the many questions that kept cropping up as I was reading.  A highly recommended read for fans of gritty crime fiction.

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