Review: Dead Silent (Calladine & Bayliss #2) by Helen H. Durrant


Print Length: 220 pages
Publisher: Joffe Books (July 29, 2015)

From Goodreads.com:  Police partners, D.I. Calladine and D.S. Ruth Bayliss race against time to catch a vicious serial killer. The first two victims are American university students and both have livestock tags fixed to their earlobes.

Who wanted them dead and what’s the connection? The detectives piece together the forensic evidence and track down the witnesses, to reach a shocking conclusion.



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My Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Book two in this series presented some problems for me as I've already read (and out of order I might add) books 3, 4, 5, 7 & 9. I've seen these characters at their best and worst. Coming back to these earlier books allows me to see where these characters began - and honestly Calladine is a bit of a jerk. He claims to have absolutely no idea what he's doing with his love life when in reality its down to him making asinine choices and then not being able to own up to them. For the first bit of this book he keeps telling Ruth he's going to "sort things out" with Monika, but then does his own thing.  He has a huge fight with Lydia when she basically admits to wanting to use his connections to further her own career, but yet he claims he's "unable to resist" her. 


The overall plot of this story was good, there wasn't quite the two parellel stories running side by side throughout the entire book that I have seen in a lot of the other ones (although there were mentions of other things happening), I did notice with this one something that I hadn't noticed in the others - all of the clues were there right from the start. It made figuring out the "who" and the "where" a whole lot easier than it should have been. I also feel like while yes, it was a rather large jump for the police to make, having been on the scene for something else, it should have at least been a blip on their radar if for nothing more than a possible lead for information on one of the clues. 

As I mentioned above, figuring out the who and the where was easier for me than in some of the other books, but the why I struggled with more. We get a mention of some things that happened in the past, and we get a very unsatisfying reason - but I don't really feel like it made sense for the killer to make the jump that he did. I was also very annoyed with one of the couples mentioned that they didn't think something was worth reporting - perhaps had they done so this would have been wrapped up sooner. 

One thing I think it's worth mentioning for those of you who may be new to this series is this is the first time (that I've seen) one of these books ends on a cliff-hanger. Although, if you look at how many are in the series, I'm sure you can figure out how it ends for at least one character. 

All things considered, this is still one of my favorite series' to read when I've got some downtime and I will be finishing the rest of them (out of order as I've yet to read the first book). 

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                                  Dead Silent is available from Amazon.com
                                     (for free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited)

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