Review - Perfect Kill by Helen Fields

Review - Perfect Kill by Helen Fields

He had never heard himself scream before. It was terrifying.

Alone, trapped in the darkness and with no way out, Bart Campbell knows that his chances of being found alive are slim.

Drugged and kidnapped, the realisation soon dawns that he’s been locked inside a shipping container far from his Edinburgh home. But what Bart doesn’t yet know is that he’s now heading for France where his unspeakable fate is already sealed…

DCI Ava Turner and DI Luc Callanach are working on separate cases that soon collide as it becomes clear that the men and women being shipped to France are being traded for women trafficked into Scotland.

With so many lives at stake, they face an impossible task – but there’s no option of failure when Bart and so many others will soon be dead…

Wow!

Perfect Kill is dark and grim it felt closer to a horror than a crime thriller at times.

Perfect Kill has two main storylines going on simultaneously. Ava is in Edinburgh investigating a steadily growing number of murders and trying to deal with her turbulent social life. 

Luc, meanwhile, is in Paris working as a liaison with Interpol where a dumped body of a Scottish teen shows all the signs of organ trafficking. 

Unsurprisingly there are links between the two cases, but I did like the fact that they were two separate cases, with no overall criminal organisation or individual binding the two together. 

Luc and Ava are both highly engaging leads and clearly have a lot of history between them that I now have to go back and explore in the earlier books. In this one they've been friends, become something more than friends and are now something less than that, with an awkward silence between them.

Which is the perfect time to mention Natasha, their friend. Tasha is going through her own battles, but the bits where she sits Ava down and gives her a good talking to left me wishing I could go round with a takeaway and a bottle of wine, tell her my own relationship problems and get some of that caring but no nonsense advice. Tasha is brilliant and I love her.

The rest of the police team are well fleshed out, with plenty of in jokes, teasing and people having their own issues. These are kept minor enough to not distract from the main thrust of the book but enough to make them feel real.

The victims were very well written, showing us them as real people with their own cares and desires and not just as people put there to be in peril.

This book is dark. Very dark. So dark, in fact, that people trafficking, prostitution, rape and organ theft is what happens before things take a nasty turn. That warning dutifully delivered, it is also told with a sensitivity and never gratuitously. 

Perfect Kill left me shaken, but anticipating more Ava and Luc.

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Perfect Kill by Helen Fields is out now, published by Avon Books

I was given a review copy via Netgalley in return for an honest review.