Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
On a small island off the North Devon coast the son of a local property tycoon is found on the beach. Two islanders confess to killing him, each claiming to have acted alone, meaning that neither can be convicted while the other stands by their story.
As if that wasn’t enough of a problem for the police, assisted by CSI Ally Dymond, everyone on the island seems to have a secret they want to keep hidden and a storm is closing in. Dymond has secrets of her own and the return of an old family friend re-awakes memories of the father’s death twenty years earlier.
T. Orr Munro has delivered in Liars Island a tightly plotted mystery that makes brilliant use of the dramatic Devon coastline and the distinctive character of its inhabitants. Her fictional is home to a collection of individuals with an almost primeval affinity with their home ground they will go to extreme length to prevent being severed.
Dymond is the ideal investigator to unravel the tangled web of loyalties that bind the islanders and may be helping a killer to stay hidden. As much because she harbours secrets of her own as through her forensic training.
This is shaping up to be one of the most enjoyable of the current crop of police procedurals. The authenticity that makes it so is rooted in the emotional depth of that characters as much as the way they follow the trail of evidence to its usually painful conclusion.
