To The Last Page

In some respects Sleeping Beauties is a fairly run-of-the-mill serial-killer case that doesn’t have anything new or imaginative to add to the text-book psychology and psychopathology of the killer or to the police investigation methods used to track him down. There is however one crucial difference that sets Jo Spain’s book apart from the rest and it’s a feature that is really the dominant theme in a her DI Tom Reynolds books; it’s another means of exploring deeper, hidden aspects of Irish society that many would prefer remained unacknowledged and forgotten. In Sleeping Beauties , Spain’s third DI Tom Reynolds book, five bodies have been discovered buried in the beauty spot of Glendalough in Co. Wicklow. It’s soon apparent that the bodies are of young single women who have been abducted as year apart, kept alive for some time and then strangled. That in itself makes the killer quite dangerous, but what is even more disturbing is that he appears to be targeting vulnerable women of a c...