CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Gemma Adderley has had enough. After years of abuse by her violent husband, she finally decides to leave her husband and takes her seven-year-old daughter Carly with her. After contacting Safe Harbour, a refuge for women, she is told to wait at a certain rendezvous where a car will pick her up.
A traumatised Carly is found on the city streets on her own the next day. Several weeks later her mother’s body is found in a canal with her chest ripped opem and her heart missing.
Detective Inspector Phil Brennan is put on the case, and his enstranged wife, psychologist Marina Esposito, is brought in to try and help unlock Carly’s memories of what happened that day.
Gemma’s husband, who professes to be a born again Christian, is the first and most obvious suspect. DI Brennan is certain Gemma’s husband is the killer. Under the influence of his addiction to alcohol, Brennan is struggling to cope with his life and his depression that arose when his wife and his daughter left him. His job is also starting to fall apart.
In the meantime, more women are going to die as a serial killer seems to be targeting vulnerable women who finally find courage to leave their abusive husbands. The killer’s mode of operation of taking away the victims’ hearts has earned the killer the nickname of The Heartbreaker.
There are many red herrings as Brennan and Esposito struggle to crack the case while trying to put aside their own problems. Brennan has to get his act together if they want to solve the case.
I was able to correctly identify the serial killer way before it was revealed. But that did not spoil my enjoyment of the book. This is not a book for the faint-hearted due to the heinous crimes and the domestic voilence within the book.
By the way, the author Tania Carver is a man. Tania Carver is the female alter ego of Martyn Waites , a popular British crime writer. The case of a male author using a female pseudonym to write fiction was relatively unheard of when Tania Carver emerged in 2009, but the explosion of female-oriented crime fiction in the last five years has led to an increasing number of male authors adopting gender-neutral names to publish their work.