To The Last Page

There's so much backstory to catch up with at the start of Redemption Road  that you might think it is the latest in a long running series featuring North Carolina police detective Elizabeth Black. John Hart however doesn't write books frequently enough to develop a long running series, but he makes up for it by bunging in a career's worth of cases and personal drama for Liz Black into just one book. You can't help think however that, as exciting a crime novel as this makes Redemption Road , it's stretching things to try to take it all in one go, even if the history extends back a number of years. Redemption Road  begins then with the hangover from at least two cases that to all intents and purposes have been already "solved". One of them involves Adrian Wall, a former police detective who was once a partner of Elizabeth Black on the force, as well as being the inspiration for her career in the police. He has just served 13 years in prison for the murder o...

In The Last Child, we have some pretty straightforward bestseller blockbuster thriller material, competently done, but with little flair or originality. The story is well-written, but there’s nothing new in the missing child storyline that shows up the fractures in family relationships and in the wider community. Family situations and characterisation are standard issue, broken families, abusive partners, a police officer who lets personal issues get in the way of duty, and duty in the way of his own family problems. No-one could complain however that it’s not readable or that there are not enough incidents, personal conflicts and rolling developments (and a few too many coincidences for it to be totally credible), and it will certainly hold you through to the end. A good, exciting, thrilling read, but we’ve seen it all before.