The Kill

By Jane Casey
  • Crime
  • Fiction
The Kill is number 5 in the Maeve Kerrigan police procedural series and my favourite - possibly because it was the first one I read, out of sequence, a few years ago when I was 8 hours waiting to be seen in a hospital emergency dept. (It actually managed to distract me from the hard chair and the person falling asleep on my shoulder.) I’ve since read all the other Kerrigan novels and they’re just as good. 
Maeve Kerrigan is a young, ambitious DC working with a London Murder Squad – beautiful (I’m guessing), of Irish descent (yay!), feisty but vulnerable, she has to fight her corner to be taken seriously by her superiors and withstand the everyday chauvinism of her male colleagues. The plots are clever and intricate and the author, who is married to a criminal barrister, has a good handle on the workings of the police, but it’s Maeve’s relationship with Josh Derwent, her DI, that makes this series stand out for me. He’s a Darcy for our times – rude, outrageous and lairy, but in possession of a not-so-well-hidden soft spot for our heroine, which adds the always welcome dimension of will-they-won’t-they to the saga. 
The latest in the series, Let the dead speak, is just published, I have my reserve in…
Staff Pick By
Oonagh