John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
Two brutal killings in Inverness are about to cause DI Lukas Mahler some sleepless days and nights as he attempts to track down the killers in two separate enquiries. Mahler is ex-Met and back in Inverness as his mother is not in the best of health, having suffered a traumatic experience in the recent past.
The first victim of murder is a police informant, Kevin Ramsay, brutally killed in what may be a gangland execution. The second victim is a bit more high-profile. Morven Murray is the queen of daytime television. On the morning of her wedding to ex-footballer Ross Campbell, her corpse is discovered by none other than her sister, Anna who has just flown in from the USA. Mahler cannot help but wonder if Anna knows more than she is prepared to admit. Is she guilty of sororicide? Could it be Ross or his brother Ewan? Could it be Donnie Stewart, a kitchen hand at the hotel that has gone missing? Whoever it is, Mahler is caught up in a deadly game of cat and mouse.
Kirk’s debut novel is more than satisfactory. Full of believable characters, the pace of the story is perfect which, with two separate murder investigations and the sub-plot regarding Mahler’s mother, is not easy to pull off. Memorable characters like local gangster Cazza MacKay may put you in mind of John Rebus and Cafferty but Kirk is able to make Cazza a different kind of villain. The revelation of whodunit is a good one which I did not predict. It’s very clear that the author has more in mind for DI Lukas Mahler and I am looking forward to that.
