Katy Pope was seventeen when she was brutally murdered on a family holiday in Majorca. Despite her mother’s high rank in the Met and the joint major investigation between the British and Spanish police, Katy’s killer was never caught.
Ten years later, Katy’s family return to the Spanish island to launch a fresh appeal for information, taking with them the now skeletal team of investigating Met detectives, and newly seconded Maggie as the family liaison officer.
But Maggie’s first international investigation quickly goes from being more than just a press conference when another British girl there on holiday goes missing, and Katy’s killer announces that it’s time for an encore . . .
I'd like to thank Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and Pan Macmillan for my copy of Dead Guilty to review via NetGalley.
Dead Guilty is the fourth book in the series from Michelle Davies featuring FLO Maggie Neville and in my opinion this series just gets better with each new book. Although this, like each of the other books, is a standalone and could definitely be read on its own merit as we are provided with some back story, I would personally recommend starting at the beginning to get to know who Maggie is as a person.
In the few years since we first met Maggie she has been on quite a roller coaster of a journey, both on the career and home front, but now it's time for a fresh start with a transfer to the Met in London although everything isn't quite as rosy as she had hoped. But it's not long before she's given the chance to use her FLO skills again when she's assigned to Operation Pivot, the cold case team investigating the high profile murder of Katy Pope in Majorca in 2009.
As the tenth anniversary of Katy's disappearance and subsequent murder, her family are returning to the island for a memorial and are hopeful that if they can bring the case back into the spotlight then they might finally get the justice they desperately crave. The family understandably want answers, especially her mother who is an ex Met officer herself, as to the reason for Katy's abduction and what happened in the week between her disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body, and the killer brought to justice of course.
From the moment Maggie and her colleagues arrive on the island of Majorca it's clear that the Spanish police are not happy that their original investigation is under scrutiny. As you'd expect from a cold case, original witnesses and suspects have come and gone so it won't be an easy time for the team to try and piece together events from the past. One thing is for sure in a tourist hotspot such as Saros is that there are no end of potential suspects, locals, tourists as well as friends of the family, so it won't be an open and shut case. With each historic statement they review, and new information that they obtained I was constantly trying to piece together clues to try and figure out who the killer was and their motive for this heinous crime. And let's just say a few red herrings threw me completely off track!
But it's the disappearance of another British tourist, in similar circumstances to Katy, whilst Maggie and the team are in town, that provides them with the chance to work alongside the Spanish police to try and locate the young woman and establish whether the same person is responsible for both cases. The chapters from the abductor's point of view are really creepy and give you a real insight into his devious mindset, it's clear that he's got a timeline that he is working to and that his underlying obsession lies elsewhere but that Katy and Jade were the innocent pawns who were unfortunately in the wrong place at the right time for his purposes.
Maggie is a character that you cannot help but like even though she's flawed and certainly not perfect. She seems to live by the mantra 'Act first, think later' which had me shaking my head at some of her actions. It's almost as if she's hell bent on destroying her own happiness with the decisions she makes although from the closing chapter it looks like her life could be turned upside down again, we'll just have to wait and see what Michelle Davies has in store for her next.
Thanks for the blog tour support Sharon x
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