The Heights
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
What starts with the gruesome discovery of a severed head on the Tube soon becomes personal for former DI Cal Drake. After one betrayal too many, Drake has abandoned the police force to become a private detective. He’s teamed up with enigmatic forensic psychologist Dr Rayhana Crane and it’s not long before the case leads them to the darkest corners of the nation’s capital and in dangerously close contact with an international crime circuit, a brutal local rivalry and a very personal quest for retribution. With the murder victim tied to Drake’s past, his new future is about to come under threat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the arresting first chapter of Bilal's complicated second Crane and Drake mystery (after 2019's The Divinities), a child is kicking a nylon bag on a London Underground train when a heavy object "wrapped in dirty cloth and what looked like newspaper" rolls out of the bag. The train's passengers begin to scream once they realize it's a severed head. Cal Drake, a former police detective who has formed a private investigation service with former pathologist Rayhana "Ray" Crane, gets a call from a police colleague who informs Cal that the head was wrapped in a newspaper carrying an article about a case Cal was involved in four years earlier. Cal joins the search for a killer. Meanwhile, Cal and Ray look into the disappearance of a young woman studying at the London School of Economics. Each of these investigations is merely a doorway into a convoluted conspiracy involving murder, money, and international crime. The protagonists' backstories intrigue, but aren't enough to make them three-dimensional. Bilal writes well enough to suggest he can remedy this defect next time.