Not exactly a romantic couples’ trip to England

4.5 stars

This is the second book in a trilogy. While readers could start with this one, I would recommend that they start at the beginning with book 1, Every Breath. There may be mild spoilers for the first book in the series in this review, so if you want to go in completely cold, skip this until you’re caught up.

Rachel Watts has pretty severely grounded after the events that led to both her and her new boyfriend (also her neighbour from two doors’ down the street) James Mycroft ending up in a near death situation, having caught the attention of some rather ruthless people while investigating the death of a homeless man. They hardly get any time to themselves, which doesn’t exactly decrease the unresolved sexual tension between them. Their developing relationship may be over before it’s really had a chance to properly begin, however, when Mycroft suddenly travels to London, leaving Rachel only a short text message, nothing else.

Having lost his parents in a horrific car jacking seven years ago, Mycroft, who despite still being a teenager, is something of a wunderkind of forensic science, has been obsessed with finding out more about their murder. Having been in the car at the time his parents died, he’s scarred both physically and emotionally and the reason he persuades his supervisor, Dr. Walsh, to allow him to go along as a consultant to London is that the death in question bears a striking resemblance to the car jacking where his parents were killed. A rare Shakespearean Folio has been stolen from the Bodleian library in Oxford. Now one of the librarians who worked there has been killed in another car jacking, his car driven off the road. Mycroft is convinced the case is linked to that of his parents’, not that he’s going to tell Dr. Walsh that.

Rachel, however, is fully aware of what Mycroft is doing, and worried about his mental state, she impulsively spends most of her savings on a return ticket to London to follow him. Alicia, her brother’s girlfriend, is spending the next three months travelling in Europe, so her first time on a plane ever won’t have to be a lonely experience. When she and Alicia track down Mycroft, he’s both shocked and dismayed to see her, but can’t really make her return to Australia when she followed him halfway across the globe.

Together with Dr Walsh, the teens are able to visit the accident site, and you don’t have to be an investigative genius to see that the story that the victim’s alleged girlfriend is telling about the accident doesn’t match up with the actual evidence on the scene. While the car jacking victim had an alibi when the Shakespeare Folio was stolen, both Rachel and Mycroft suspect that he was involved somehow, and that is why he was driven off the road and shot at. When Rachel takes it upon herself to visit the dead man’s work place in Oxford, claiming to be his niece, she finds clues that suggest their theory is correct, but before she can tell anyone about it, she’s abducted and wakes up in a remote warehouse. Some very threatening people want to know what she knows about the case, and whether she knows anything about the extremely valuable Folio’s location. They’re clearly the people responsible for the murder, and everything suggests that if she doesn’t come up with something clever, she will be their next victim.