Review: The Cardiff Killings (DI Jemima Huxley Thrillers #1) by Gaynor Torrance

            

Print Length: 279 pages
Publisher: Joffe Books (March 20, 2022)

From Goodreads.com: An isolated manor house. Shallow woodland graves. A troubled female detective facing the biggest case of her career.

The call comes early in the morning. David and Helen Tremaine have discovered a body buried in the grounds of their large Victorian manor house, Llys Faen Hall, just north of Cardiff.

DI Jemima Huxley and her partner, DS Dan Broadbent, race to the scene to discover that a second body has been unearthed in a shallow woodland grave. And the forensic team working the site believe this is just the start.

Jemima knows this is the biggest case of her career. But it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Struggling to get pregnant, she is a woman on the edge, a woman who self-harms just to make it through the day. And with no one reported missing, no apparent motive and no obvious suspect, the investigation is anything but straightforward.

Eight graves. Eight dead women. All with pomegranate seeds placed inside their mouths.

When Jemima makes an unexpected breakthrough, she enters a desperate race against time to prevent more women dying.

Please note this book was previously published as Revenge.

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

Thankfully, I found this book on Kindle Unlimited because, sadly, I had to DNF it. Typically, I love a well-written, flawed character,  but Jemima was NOT it. From the first time we meet her, she is consumed with the fact that she desperately wants a child with her husband but is struggling with infertility issues. A fact that should have made me more sympathetic toward her, but her infertility seemed to be her only character trait (other than her self-harming). 

In fact, that is all that she seems to be able to focus on, going so far as to hope she doesn't see her co-worker's wife and child because she's jealous. This, in turn, causes her to think poorly of said co-worker just because he has what she wants. She then goes into these long internal monologues about how hard it is to be a woman on the police force, so she cannot let her emotions get the better of her (or her mental state), but she still can't seem to stop herself from focusing on HERSELF and HER issues. It began to seem as though everyone and everything (including the murder investigation and the victims) came second to her and her feelings and to be honest, I stopped caring about the ending because of it leading to me deleting it from my kindle and reviewing only the parts that I read. 


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 The Cardiff Killings is Available from Amazon.com
(for free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited)


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