Review: No Safe Place (Detective Liz Field #1) by Hannah Brennan

      

Print Length: 414 pages

Publisher: Avon UK (July 31, 2025)

From Goodreads.com: There’s no one more deadly than the killer you know.

A man is found brutally stabbed and left for dead.

A young woman is killed in a frenzied attack in the middle of the night on a quiet residential road.

Detective Liz Field is brought in t lead the investigation. The first victim was a well-respected child psychologist. The second victim was once his patient. But that was fifteen years ago. Why is someone targeting them now?

Field is under pressure not just from the top. There are those who would happily see her fail if it means they can take her place. Something about this case feels too close to home.

And the killer is escalating.

Field is in a race against time to solve the case and confront her own buried past – before the they strike again.

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

Before I get into the details, I should note that I received an ARC of this book. While reading, I noticed a few inconsistencies in the story, though these may have been resolved between my reading and the novel's final release. That being said, I pride myself on honest reviews, so I felt it was important to mention them in case other readers come across them after publication. I will address these things first so that we can then move on to the rest of the novel. Thankfully, there aren't many examples, and all of them came later in the book. 

The first one I noticed was when Detective Field goes to visit Callum, she shows him a copy of his book and even references it, but then later on he asks her if she has read his book. Obviously she has if she knew enough about to point out its correlation to the events that were happening. 

The second instance that really stood out to me was later on when Callum was back home with Lily. It had been mentioned previously that the police had boarded up his back door because it "kept opening", and they didn't want to the place robbed. Then when Callum is home again, it's suddenly banging open? He goes to the kitchen, closes the door and locks it (which made me question why the police hadn't done this in the first place, never mind the question of what happened to the steps they had taken to board it up). A few moments later Callum is moving something on front of the "broken back door" to keep him from easily opening it. So was it broken or not?" 

NOW THAT I HAVE GOTTEN ALL OF THAT OUT OF THE WAY. LET ME MOVE ON TO A MORE IN DEPTH REVIEW OF THIS STORY AND ITS CHARACTERS. 

To begin with Detective Elizabeth Field (forevermore known throughout this novel as Field because she hates her first name), is a very hard character to like. She gets angry easily, and what's more is that she lets that anger take over. At one point she is yelling what seems to be one of her only friends because her son reached out to said friend out of worry. Then she is yelling at her son, and throwing his old illness in his face. She even contemplates smacking a "snug smile" off a co-workers face, and this is AFTER she also debates throwing crime scene photos of the desk of a psychiatrist just because he had the audacity to disagree with her. Now, I may have tried to be a bit more understanding, had this character not been a grown woman in HER FIFTIES. 

The secondary characters on her team (mainly Riley and Wilson) really needed to be called by their first names so that it was easier to remember who was who (Riley was a man and Wilson was a girl) because sometimes the back and forth got really confusing in terms of who was who.

That aside, parts of this novel came across as very stilted. The actions and conversations at times seemed more robotic than anything else, and the entire section that was dedicated to the "paper" written by the original victim came across as though the author was throwing in a lot of words that normal readers won't understand in an attempt to make the victim sound as smart as he was purported to be.

Also, and this is in no way me bashing the author or the story, but to my American friends who have a background in the medical field (specifically paramedics), you may have the same questions I did. Mainly the fact that we jumped from a team of medics loading the first victim into an ambulance, and then pages later having a different one (or maybe it was the same one but either way why were they still at the scene of the crime) telling Field that the victim was out of surgery. There was also Field asking if the medic had been "debriefed" because huh? In all of my years providing emergency medical care in a pre-hospital setting, not once have I ever been "debriefed", much less had an update on the status of a patient who had been transported to the hospital. Also, why were the police officers doing a "by the way your husband was attacked" house call on the wife when the hospital should have already notified her as his next of kin? Not necessarily important, but it contributed to the overall weird vibe this book gave me. 

In the end, while I don't think I will intentionally seek out book number two in this series, if it happens to come across my radar, and it sounds interesting, I will most likely give it a read as I see a lot of potential within this author to expand these characters. 

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.