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.
Out working on the golf course, groundsman George Christie spots elderly regular, Tom Bradshaw, out for an early round of golf. Alarmingly, Tom collapses in a heap and George, suspecting a heart attack, rushes to his aid. But the old man is in shock and points off into the distance. George looks and, to his horror, sees a woman’s body hanging lifeless from a tree.
So begins the second novel in the DI Eve Hunter series. In a seemingly unrelated incident, IT consultant Dean Johnstone is found dead in his central Aberdeen apartment apparently bludgeoned to death by a blow to the head with a solid bronze statue. However, the coroner states that the blow to the head would not have killed him and he would almost certainly recovered had he not been suffocated before he recovered consciousness.
As Eve and her team begin to investigate and discover that the hanging was no suicide, they enter two different worlds; the sordid world of sex slavery and the elite world of private schools, big business and privilege. Is there a connection between the death of Dean and one of his best friends, Andrew Shirrif who committed suicide just a year or so before? And why do the parents not want to talk about either event? Is there a connection with the woman left hanging from a tree at the golf course?
This is a nice, well-written police procedural, exciting and full of interesting supporting characters. Masson often refers back to her previous novel, Hold Your Tongue, which does not impede enjoyment of this thriller but some of you may wish to read that one before embarking on this one. But Out for Blood is definitely worth a read. I enjoyed it and look forward to the next one.
