Book Review: Glass Arrows, DCI Greg Geldard Book 2, Heather Peck
Mystery: Glass Arrows, DCI Greg Geldard Book 2, Heather Peck
Blog Tour August 2, 2021
Fresh off the successful resolution of his first murder case, DCI Greg Geldard has a promotion and a new posting. Now in Norfolk, he walks into the job not knowing his team, not knowing the city, and not knowing the turkey farm where a body awaits him. A human body. Due to an outbreak of avian flu the turkeys are being culled. Unfortunately, someone used this as an opportunity to cull one of the farm workers as well.
The investigation soon takes on unexpected breadth. Another body is found. Another farm is infected with the avian flu. And the flu is a strain from Eastern Europe, somehow arriving on the farm despite no turkeys having come from there. This implies human transmission. As the contact tracers and the police discover, there is more than one way to spread a disease. And someone is willing to kill in order to hide the truth.
This is a book that is hard to summarize without giving away too much information. Even explaining the title might be a spoiler of sorts, unless you are familiar with the slang term that inspired it. Suffice it to say that DCI Geldard starts investigating a murder, but finds that murder is but the latest of a string of crimes that had been going on in plain sight but without anyone noticing.
Heather Peck has created a winning character in Geldard. He is deeply moral, profoundly loyal (a trait that hurt him in the first book and again in this one), and a dogged investigator. Once his team begins to know him, they appreciate his insight and leadership, his hard work and his willingness to listen. Peck is also a brilliant creator of plots. This one brings in an international syndicate involved in smuggling, slavery, and fraud, as well as murder. Yet unlike some writers who rely on a genius investigator considering a heretofore overlooked piece of evidence to pull a felon out of a hat, Geldard’s team does it with hard work, careful data collection, communication, and more than a little luck from cooperative weather and foolish criminals. This feels like a much more realistic sort of police procedural than the magical deduction of a detective mastermind…or the spontaneous confession on the stand of a witness caught in his own web of lies.
I am unfamiliar with Norfolk, but I get the feeling that there will be enough crime in that city for DCI Geldard to stay busy for a few more novels. At least, I hope there is in the fictional version of Norfolk–not in the actual community!
Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for our copy of Glass Arrows, given in exchange for our honest review. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives on this book, check out the other bloggers participating in this tour.
Also see:
Book Review: Secret Places, Heather Peck
Book Review: Glass Arrows, DCI Greg Geldard Book 2, Heather Peck
Thanks for the blog tour support x