DEAD OF WINTER

Lee Weeks’s fifth gritty crime novel, Dead of Winter, will grip her many fans with its fast pace and no-holds-barred approach to gore and horror. Not for nothing has the author been termed the female James Patterson.

In this new novel she has switched from the mainly Hong Kong settings of her earlier novels, and Dead of Winter takes place in England, beginning with the gruesome discovery of two bodies buried in a garden on the outskirts of London in the village of Totteridge.

Thirteen years earlier the then Detective Inspector Callum Carmichael had walked into a Sussex cottage, which he and his family had rented for a holiday, and found his wife and daughter horribly slaughtered together with the equally mutilated corpse of one of his wife’s friends. Carmichael had become the chief suspect but no one was ever charged with the murder. But now the discovery of the bodies in Totteridge links the two cases.

With the police undecided as to whether or not to reopen the earlier case, Carmichael himself takes action, and the horrors that are uncovered take him far beyond the remote farm in Yorkshire to which he had retreated after the loss of his family.

The novel races from shock to shock, with action rather than rounded characters leading the pace and sometimes losing credibility, and yet it is indeed, as the publishers claim, impossible to put down.