Book Review: Death by Dark Waters (DCI Satterthwaite Mystery #1) by Jo Allen

Death by Dark Waters

 (DCI Satterthwaite Mystery#1)

by Jo Allen

Amazon US / UK / AU / CA /

B&N / Apple / GP / Kobo

The charred remains of a child are discovered - a child no one seems to have missed...

It's high summer, and the lakes are in the midst of an unrelenting heatwave. Uncontrollable fell fires are breaking out across the moors faster than they can be extinguished. When firefighters uncover the body of a dead child at the heart of the latest blaze, Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite's arson investigation turns to one of murder.

Jude was born and bred in the Lake District. He knows everyone... and everyone knows him. Except his intriguing new Detective Sergeant, Ashleigh O'Halloran, who is running from a dangerous past and has secrets of her own to hide...

Temperatures - and tension - in the village are rising, and with the body count rising Jude and his team race against the clock to catch the killer before it's too late...

The first in the gripping, Lake District-set, DCI Jude Satterthwaite series.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Aware of her inability to leave him be, she nevertheless couldn’t help herself, so that sometimes she thought she spent all her time watching out for him, not so that she could avoid him, but so she could give him grief. Sometimes when she looked at Jude, with his cool determination to stay civil, she realised she didn’t like herself very much, that there was a bitterness within her heart that surfaced only when she was with him. Three years after they’d split, she should have been over it.


She preferred someone a little less tempestuous and with a slightly sweeter nature, though experience and the wreckage of her marriage had taught her circumspection. Scott, her estranged husband, was living proof that sweetness and calm didn’t preclude a man being a two timing bastard.


Laurie might, if called upon, prove a match for a baton wielding thug or two, but it was evident that he had no weapons sufficient to repel a woman in her fifties who didn’t understand the meaning of the word no.


Clever, compassionate and mostly silent, his best friend was a bunch of contradictions. A vegetarian, teetotal, chain smoking gay churchgoer, he was the model of common sense, the man who showed the importance of balance and sometimes, he felt, kept him sane.


… still staring out at the tiny garden in the house he’d bought just to be free of all his memories of her. But it didn’t work like that. Memories weren’t something you packed into boxes, unpacked when you were ready, or sorted into piles for keeping or reusing or recycling, or simply throwing away. They clung to you with the tenacity of the devil, and ambushed you when you least expected them to.

My Review:

Jo Allen’s clever debut was a well-crafted and slow-building tale of abduction, arson, and murder. The narrative was loaded with insightfully keen observations of human nature at both ends of the ethical and moral spectrum, as such, we were privy to the light and dark sides of Ms. Allen’s flawed, oddly compelling, and complex characters. As a new transfer to the team, Detective Sergeant Ashleigh was forced to hit the ground running and she quickly proved herself to be not only up for the task but a major asset, despite her uncanny tendency to annoy her new boss while doing so. The case was complicated and compounded by difficult personalities on both sides of the law, and I found the characters’ backstories to be as compelling as the current case they were working. I am chomping at the bit to start the next in the series, Death At Eden’s End, which is already locked and loaded on my beloved Kindle.

About The Author

Amazon
Goodreads
Facebook
Twitter

Jo Allen was born in Wolverhampton and is a graduate of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and the Open University. After a career in economic consultancy, she took up writing and was first published under the name Jennifer Young in genres of short stories, romance, and romantic suspense. In 2017 she took the plunge and began writing the genre she most likes to read – crime. Now living in Edinburgh, she spends as much time as possible in the English Lakes. In common with all her favorite characters, she loves football (she’s a season ticket holder with her beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers) and cats.

Follow Aria 

Website: www.ariafiction.com

Twitter: @aria_fiction 

Facebook: @ariafiction 

Instagram: @ariafiction