A Question of Identity
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4.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Lafferton is struggling through a bitter winter, with heavy snowfalls paralysing the town, though at least the police can be sure the ram raiders who have been targeting antique and jewellers' shops will be lying low.
The biggest worry the elderly have is how to keep warm, until 82-year-old Doris Upcott is found strangled in her home, followed by the deaths of 2 other residents of the same sheltered housing complex. Each time, the murderer has left a unique signature at the crime scene, which should help DCS Simon Serrailler, desperate to identify him before he kills again.
When links are found between these and 3 similar murders elsewhere, Serrailler is obliged to cross unfamiliar territory in his search for answers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the outset of Hill's solid seventh procedural featuring police detective Simon Serrailler (after 2011's The Betrayal of Trust), the authorities provide builder Alan Keyes with a new identity to shield him from vigilantes after Keyes is acquitted in 2002 of the savage murders of three elderly women in Yorkshire. Ten years later, similar killings occur on Serrailler's patch. The first victim, 80-year-old widow Elinor Sanders, is found tied to a chair in her home and strangled. In an additional macabre touch, her murderer has also clipped her toenails. Since a scene featuring the thoughts of the now 42-year-old Keyes precedes the discovery of Sanders's corpse, most readers will soon suspect that he's resumed his murderous ways. Not everyone will be engaged by the vicissitudes of Serrailler's personal life (he's dating a married woman with a severely ill husband) that fill the long bloodless sections between Keyes's acquittal and the Sanders murder.
