Written in Blood by Chris Carter @SimonSchusterUK @AnneCater

Source: Review copy
Publication: 23 July 2020 from Simon & Schuster
PP: 496
ISBN-13: 978-1471179570

A serial killer will stop at nothing…

The Killer

His most valuable possession has been stolen.

Now he must retrieve it, at any cost.

The Girl

Angela Wood wanted to teach the man a lesson. It was a bag, just like all the others.

But when she opens it, the worst nightmare of her life begins.

The Detective

A journal ends up at Robert Hunter’s desk. It soon becomes clear that there is a serial killer on the loose. And if he can’t stop him in time, more people will die.

If you have read it

You must die

Chris Carter has not had an easy year, so it was with some trepidation that I approached his 11^th Robert Hunter book, not sure how that would have impacted his writing. I need not have worried. This book is a cracker and the Robert Hunter series shows no signs of being other than top notch.

It starts with a great character – Angela Wood. She has her own moral code and though her actions are not always on the right side of the law when it comes to finding ways to make her living, she still knows where to draw the line.

So when she sees a man in the bar she is in being aggressively rude to an elderly man, she decides to teach him her own brand of lesson. And that’s how she comes to be in possession of something that she wishes she had never seen…

And that’s enough to have the reader deep into the plot and raring to find out more. From that point, the pace never slows and the trail that leads to a deadly, devious serial killer is begun.

Part of Carter’s magic with the Hunter books is his ability to give us serious insight into the mind and method of the serial killer, all the while contrasting this with the minds of Hunter, his sidekick, Garcia and here, our unwitting potential victim, Angela.

Throughout the series, we see what a toll profiling and hunting down serial killers takes on Hunter and that makes us like him all the more. He’s given up his life – certainly any social life he might have dreamt of having, in the pursuit of such devastating but fiendishly clever killers.

Now, I like serial killer books and this series does not stint on gore and graphic details, so if that’s not your thing, then now you know, but the characters are interesting, the plot is fast moving and ingenious and the whole thing is an exercise in taut plotting and keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

Always you’re concerned as a reader that this time Hunter has come up against a foe who won’t be easy to defeat; that before the book has ended, there will be casualties you hadn’t counted on and you find yourself invested in these characters in a way that means your pulse is up and your heart is racing as the clock ticks down to the startling denouement.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Verdict: A class act in a superior series. The Hunter books keep delivering in spades. Thrilling, heart-pounding and nerve-wracking all in one delicious plot filled bundle. Highly recommended.

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