Wednesday 13 March 2019

Books Read: The Scandal by Mari Hannah

When an young man is found stabbed to death in a side street in Newcastle city centre in the run up to Christmas, it looks like a botched robbery to DCI David Stone. But when DS Frankie Oliver arrives at the crime scene, she gets more than she bargained for.

She IDs the victim as Herald court reporter, thirty-two-year old Chris Adams she's known since they were kids. With no eyewitnesses, the MIT are stumped. They discover that when Adams went out, never to return, he was working on a scoop that would make his name. But what was the story he was investigating? And who was trying to cover it up?

As detectives battle to solve the case, they uncover a link to a missing woman that turns the investigation on its head. The exposé has put more than Adams' life in danger. And it's not over yet.

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I'd like to thank Alainna at Orion Books for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and for my copy of The Scandal which I received to review via NetGalley.

The Scandal is the latest offering in the Stone and Oliver series by Mari Hannah which sees them dealing with case that turns out to be anything but straight forward and a bit too close to home for them both. When DS Frankie Oliver arrives at the scene of a suspected mugging she certainly didn't expect to be one to identify the body of her old childhood friend Chris Adams.

DCI David Stone and DS Frankie Oliver are fast becoming one of my favourite police duos, I love how their partnership has developed over the course of the series and especially now that they know each others back stories so they know what has affected them so deeply in the past and made them the way they are today.  Both Frankie and David are 100% dedicated to being the best at their jobs that it leaves very little time for any sort of personal life so it's no wonder that most of their time is spent together.

The prologue certainly opened at a frenetic pace and gets your pulse racing as you fear for the woman being chased, and so many questions spring to mind wanting to know who she is and why she's in danger?  But like a good wine, you have to wait patiently for the storyline to develop before you discover the important part that she plays in the whole case.

The more they investigate the events that led to his death, the more complex the case turns out to be and they realise that Chris might have been onto something after all.  The evidence takes them onto the streets of Newcastle and into the heart of the Northumberland countryside as the team follow the clues as to the story he was working on, a story that would have made his name in the journalism world.  Can they complete the investigations he was doing and bring the story into the spotlight?

Mari Hannah certainly doesn't shy away from hard hitting topics, in this instance the plight of the homeless community living on the streets of Newcastle in the middle of a cold winter as well as suspected abuse of power that we should all be concerned about with, subjects that she deals with such sensitivity.

The Scandal was another fantastic read from Mari Hannah and I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment from Stone and Oliver whenever that might be!

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