AK Turner
Bonnier (Zaffre), 20 July 2023
Available as: PB, 352pp audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 978-1804180594
I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a copy of Case Sensitive via Netgalley to consider for review.
Coming a bit late to this series I can already see I'll have fun catching up with books 1 and 2.
Cassie Raven is a mortuary technician with a very special talent - she can hear whispers from the dead. Or she used to be able to - at the start of this book her ability has apparently dried up, leaving her struggling rather with her profession, as well as with personal issues (her relationship with her father, and whether or not she should be dating one of the pathologists from the morgue).
Set in Camden Town, where Cassie lives in a boat on the canal, the story is high on atmosphere. This is a slightly rowdy part of London, the centre for a thriving alternative scene but also with pockets of deep poverty, and, in contrast, ongoing gentrification. Turner makes good use of this, really getting inside the different settings as well as peopling the story with intriguing characters for what is basically the eruption of a decade-old murder mystery into the present day.
And it's a solidly based detective mystery - while there is a hint of the supernatural, this isn't allowed to overshadow the story: Cassie spends much of the book doubting that her ability ever was real, and even when it does work, it only gives her the barest of clues about what happened. The detective work here is at the centre of things and the truth will only be revealed through rigorous sleuthing. While that is not all by the police, Cassie does have a partner there in unravelling things - DS Phyllida Flyte, also I think a returning character to this series. The chapters are alternately written form Flyte's and Cassie's point of view, allowing us to see what each woman is thinking about the other - useful because while they spar pretty dramatically there is a definite will-they, won't-they element between the contrasting pair.
Flyte herself is an interesting and well-drawn character, an incomer from leafy Winchester to North London and to the Met and - because of this and because she's a woman - something of an outsider in the cliquey Major Crime team. Many of the undercurrents of this book are about how she deals with that and the threats and problems to be suffered in a far from reconstructed section of the Met Police - something numerous recent real events support. Flyte also has her own problems; she's mourning a stillborn child and has a frosty relationship with her mum and with her ex. Like Cassie, she, too, faces romantic dilemmas and there's a definite sense that both women are trying to find a way forward.
The crime plot at the heart of the book is twisty and well done, with surprises to the very end. There are, of course, Secrets to be revealed - but they aren't always what you'd expect. I enjoyed the balance between the two sides - professional and personal - here and, like real life, loose ends are left on both fronts. I look forward to seeing where they will lead Cassie and Phyllida in future books.
For more information about Case Sensitive, see the author's website here.
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