The Blood Promise by Liz Mistry

 

"This is revenge for the broken promise, one that was written in blood, our blood. A promise made in blood".

The Blood Promise by Liz Mistry is a fast-paced noir thriller. It is the first book in the brand new The Solanki and McQueen crime series, set around West Lothian.

It's a combination of a twisty psychological thriller and police procedural.

Blurb:

A deadly gift

Imogen Clark wakes up on her 16th birthday to find her parents dead at the breakfast table, along with a message from their killer.

A twist of fate

Detectives Jazzy Solanki and Annie McQueen join the investigation, but the more they discover, the more Jazzy suspects that the killing is a twisted message for her. Jazzy shares the same birthday as Imogen, and believes that this is more than a coincidence.

A race to catch a killer.

When Jazzy discovers the connection between the killer and the stalker who has been following her for years, she is forced to confront the dark past she was desperate to keep hidden. She must stop at nothing to solve the case before she becomes the next victim...

On the morning of her 16th birthday Imogen Clark is in her bedroom, waiting for the summons from her parents and anticipating a lovely surpise. When she finally goes down to the kitchen, she is shocked to discover the bodies of her parents, brutally killed, and staged in a gruesome scene of "celebration".

Who would leave such a carefully set out scene for a young girl to discover? 

"At sixteen, Imogen Clark would carry that with her forever. In a little corner of Imogen's heart, a frisson of fear would always remain. She'd find it hard to trust and to feel safe ever again and the life she imagined for herself when she went to bed last night would be irrevocably altered".

Detectives Jazzy Solanki and Annie McQueen, both recently demoted, attend the scene and begin the investigation.

Both detectives suffer from the previous traumas that shape their set of mind and actions. Neither of the two seem to have any diplomatic skills. Jazzy realises that "it was this stubborn, quick-to-anger attitude that had landed her partnered with Queenie. Now the pair of them would be traipsing the streets of Livingston like some bloody Little and Large throwback act".

Jazzy is having flashbacks from her own past and disturbing childhood. Reading the clues she comes to a conclusion that the killer is sending her a macabre message.

Annie appears as an unpleasant, foul-mouthed police officer at first, but she has a quirky gift of her own. She is able to retain "photographic impressions of a scene after viewing it for mere seconds". While useful during the investigation, it makes her life more challenging, with the vivid memories haunting her, as she has to" live with this every day".

While Jazzy is trying to keep her traumatic past from her colleagues, she knows she has to reveal it in order to understand the escalation of the recent brutality. The killer is exceptionally cruel and taunts them without mercy. The detectives have to solve the murders before more victims are claimed.

The Blood Promise is a creepy, unsettling and twisty read.

I read a Netgalley copy of the book, and hope that the E-book availble to buy is better edited. I found it hard to understand when two different narratives were not distinguished by different fonts or spacing. A few times I had to re-read the page to see when the voice changes to a different narrator.

Another little qualm: the nasty boss is known as Dick. It's obvious that he is a bully and totally unreasonable, but the amount of Dick references was grating.

Liz Mistry's thrillers (the Nikki Parekh series and  DI Gus McGuire series) are typically dark and bleak, as the themes she explores in her fiction show the brutal side of the humankind, so I'm not sure what about the latest book that made me wince more than usual.

I'm not the biggest fan of staged murder scenes in fiction (like The Snowman by Jo Nesbo, Angel Maker by Morgan Greene and others). The detailed descriptions of mutilated bodies leave me rather nauseated. And there is a lot of stomach-churning detail in The Blood Promise too.

Get ready for a terrifying thrill ride that will leave you breathless. And if you're squeamish, don't read this book while eating, just don't.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Liz Mistry for my e-copy of the book!