Surprised Me — In a Good Way

Manon Bradshaw is smart, competent, and lonely. She’s a Detective Sargeant in Cambridgeshire, and while she is having exactly the level of career success she looked for, she spends her off hours trying to build relationships from Internet dates she doesn’t really want to be on. Some of her actions made me think, “Urgh! Don’t do it!” But her actions are what a lot of people do, so it rang true in a way that can be hard to capture on a page.

When a young graduate student goes missing, Manon is one of the investigators assigned to the case. Of course, all is not as it seems. And what I particularly liked–in addition to the complex characters–was that the roles those characters played, and how the plot developed, was not what I anticipated. At one point I was pretty sure I’d figure out who the killer was, and as it turned out, that person was not the killer at all, which strengthened the book.

This book is the first in a series; I’ve already bought the second.