Someone Else's Skin
Introducing Detective Inspector Marnie Rome
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and Nominated for a Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel
No two victims are alike.
DI Marnie Rome knows this better than most. Five years ago, her family home was the scene of a shocking and bloody crime that left her parents dead and her foster brother in prison. Marnie doesn’t talk much about her personal life, preferring to focus on work. Not even her partner, DS Noah Jake, knows much about Marnie’s past. Though as one of the few gay officers on the force and half Jamaican to boot, Noah’s not one to overshare about his private life either. Now Marnie and Noah are tackling a case of domestic violence, and a different brand of victim.
Hope Proctor stabbed her husband in desperate self-defense. A crowd of witnesses in the domestic violence shelter where she’s staying saw it happen, but none of them are telling quite the same story, and the simple question remains: how did Leo Proctor get in to the secure shelter? Marnie and Noah shouldn’t even have been there when it happened but they were interviewing another resident, Ayana Mirza. They’re trying to get Ayana to testify against her brothers for pouring bleach on her face for bringing dishonor the family, and blinding her in one eye. But Ayana knows that her brothers are looking for her, and she has no doubt that they’ll kill her this time.
As the violence spirals, engulfing the residents of the women's shelter, Marnie finds herself drawn into familiar territory: A place where the past casts long shadows and she must tread carefully to survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In British author Hilary's promising if uneven first novel, Det. Insp. Marnie Rome and her partner, Det. Sgt. Noah Jake, visit a rundown women's shelter in North London, where they plan to get testimony from Ayana Mirza, a domestic abuse survivor. Instead, they stumble on another domestic abuse survivor, Hope Proctor, standing over her bleeding husband, Leo, bloody knife in hand. Rome is no stranger to violence her foster brother murdered her parents and the case seems an open and shut example of another possessive, violent husband finally pushing his wife too far. Nagging questions remain, such as how Leo got into what was supposed to be a secure facility, the safety of which is further cast into doubt when Hope vanishes and Ayana's abuser kidnaps her. Hilary can be heavy-handed in establishing Rome's character and backstory, but she skillfully interweaves multiple viewpoints on the way to the mystery's unsettling conclusion.
