Book Review: Ritual Demise, Cavendish and Walker Book 7, Sally Rigby
Mystery: Ritual Demise, Cavendish and Walker Book 7, Sally Rigby
BLOG TOUR August 26, 2020
I am truly falling in love with this wonderful series about the UK team of women solving crimes in the fictional city of Lenchester. Detective Chief Inspector Whitney Walker is a single mother who leads a team of police detectives solving the toughest cases. Her friend and ally is Dr. Georgina Cavendish, a professor and forensic psychologist who works with the detectives as a profiler. These two have fought with each other and with a sexist system to get where they are, and now are able to appreciate each other’s friendship and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Though there is really nothing that should be enjoyed about yet another serial killer loose in their city.
When a body is found in the woods near the city, laid out in a meadow of flowers with her head resting on a heraldic pillow, Cavendish suspects that a ritual killer has just gotten started. Walker’s boss insists otherwise. He does NOT want another serial killer to be at work. Admittedly, for a mid-sized English city, Lenchester has seen quite a few of them in recent years, a fact mentioned several times in the book. That’s probably the danger of having a crime novelist use your town as the setting for her series…though on the plus side, since the town comes from her imagination, it really is a safe place for those of us made from flesh and blood to spend time.
Despite the loud protestations from the superintendent, Cavendish is right. More bodies are found in the same place, the killer toying with the police by leaving a note, turning their hidden camera in the wrong direction, and continuing to use pillows decorated with a heraldic coat of arms. One twist in the typical serial killer playbook is that each victim is killed differently. One is both stabbed and drowned. One is poisoned through her ear. One is dragged behind a vehicle. Another is bitten by a snake. The killer is sending a message through the methods of death, one which takes a while for the team to hear.
Meanwhile Cavendish and Walker are both dealing with personal issues as well. Walker reconnects with someone from high school, someone who changed her life when they were young. Cavendish’s father is arrested for financial crimes and he insists that his daughter come home to London to “present a united front.” These personal challenges help draw the characters closer together as they lean on each other for support. Their relationship really adds to the chemistry that makes these books so appealing to me.
Sally Rigby has a killer series going. (Yes, I could have resisted the pun but I really didn’t try very hard.) Walker and Cavendish are opposites in many ways: a physically short single mom from the working class fighting her way up the ladder in the tough police department versus a striking and tall posh woman from wealth thriving in her academic ivory tower. But they are drawn together by a common intelligence and grit, a refusal to let killers get away with their crimes, and a recognition of a kindred spirit in the other. I have greatly enjoyed the books from the series that I have read so far and I am hoping to add more of them to my TBR.
Our great thanks to Emma Welton of damppebbles blog tours for our copy of this book, provided solely in exchange for our review. The opinions are those of Scintilla. Check out the rest of the blog tour for additional reviews of Ritual Demise.
Book Review: Ritual Demise, Cavendish and Walker Book 7, Sally Rigby
Thanks so much 🙂