Regular visitors to The Quick and the Read know that I’m kind of obsessed with crime fiction – specifically, I love pacey, engaging police procedurals. Even better if the lead characters are distinctive or quirky in some way, plus an interesting setting is hugely important to me.
This book ticked all my boxes for a great read.
The story centres on the tattooing community in Brighton – tattooists and their clients – and it is one of these tattooists, Marni Mullins, who discovers the first murder victim. For personal reasons, she wants to keep away from the police, but her path keeps crossing with DI Francis Sullivan who is looking into the gruesome crime…and the ones that follow.
Gruesome, I hear you say? Yes. Stomach-churningly so, because we have a killer who is flaying bodies for their tattoos in order to please The Collector. The chapters narrated by the killer are not for the squeamish!
Still, I found the mystery to be fast-paced and it definitely kept me guessing to the end. I liked the fact that the murders came quickly at the start of the novel which gave Mullins and Sullivan plenty of leads to follow. The fact that the investigation was centred on the artistry of the tattooists was really interesting – I’d have been a useless investigator in this very alien world (to me!)
I liked the two leads – the naive and young DI Francis Sullivan certainly has quite an eye-opening experience over the course of this novel. However, for me, Marni Mullins was the more engaging of the two – she is tough, spirited, clever and certainly no damsel in distress! I loved that she can absolutely hold her own in any situation. Together, they make an interesting pair and it was good to see how their relationship developed.
Overall, I’d recommend this to strong-stomached lovers of crime fiction. It is gory and grim, but also engaging and lively. I definitely want to read more about Sullivan and Mullins.
I’m grateful to the Tsundoku Squad on Twitter who chose this as our June book club read – I hadn’t heard of this series before and am heartened to see that there are two further books that I’ll be reading – ‘Her Last Breath’ and ‘The Embalmer’.
The Tsundoku Squad group review can be found here – there are some spoilers. We had a lot of fun discussing this novel!
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Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
You obsessed with crime fiction? Noooo 😆 This book sounds like another good one. I like that it centres on the tattooing community because I don’t think I’ve come across a book quite like that.
Haha, you noticed my obsession! Xx