The Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3) by Nadine Matheson Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley #3
Pages: 448
Published by Hanover Square Press on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
While an innocent man sits behind bars, a serial killer with a gruesome signature has started killing again. And only Anjelica Henley can stop him.
After twenty-five years behind bars, Andrew Kenan has just been exonerated. Newly discovered DNA evidence proves that he was not the cold-blooded serial killer the world thought he was, the one who sewed his victims' eyes shut before burying them alive. Before Kenan can taste freedom, however, he is found dead in his prison cell. And Inspector Anjelica Henley, who worked the original investigation, is left in shock.
Henley never thought she'd have to revisit one of the most horrifying cases of her career. But now, after evading justice for twenty-five years, the true killer is back, and so is their gruesome signature. Can Henley stop them once and for all? Or has the Serial Crimes Unit finally met its match?
Drawing on her experiences as a criminal attorney, and exploring themes of race, class and justice, Nadine Matheson's newest entry in the Anjelica Henley series is her darkest, most adrenaline-fueled mystery yet.
My Review:
I picked this up because I was utterly riveted by the first two books in the Inspector Anjelica Henley series, The Jigsaw Man and The Binding Room. It’s taken me nearly a month after the publication date to brace myself to read the book, because this is a series where the word “enjoy” doesn’t actually apply to the reading of it.
Riveted, on the other hand, certainly does. Compelled, also. Certainly glued to the edge of my seat for nearly four hours, unable to put the thing down out of fascination and fear that something else even more terrible was about to happen.
Which, to be fair, it generally was.
Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley is a member of the (London) Metropolitan Police Serial Crimes Unit. It’s a unit that didn’t exist in 1995, when the serial killer the press dubbed “The Burier” began his spree of kidnapping young women, torturing them, raping them, burying them until they died of asphyxiation, then digging up their bodies and staging the discoveries of their corpses.
Then 15-year-old Anjelica Henley’s best friend Melissa was the first – but certainly not the last – of The Burier’s victims.
The Burier’s spree came to an end in 1996, when Andrew Streeter was convicted of all five monstrous killings. While Streeter protested his innocence repeatedly at his trial, at his conviction, and frequently and often over the twenty plus years since, the fact that the killings stopped convinced even the doubters that they had the right man – even if there might have been a few – or even more than a few – irregularities in the way the police handled the case.
But those irregularities have come back to haunt Anj, the entire SCU, and every single person who ever had anything to do with that old case. Because Andrew Streeter, the man everyone simply knew was guilty, had gotten the attention of a high-profile “Innocence Project” that successfully convinced a review board that those irregularities were the result of a police cover up and corruption that stitched him up for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with his actual guilt or innocence of the crime for which he was convicted.
He was merely convenient. Or in someone’s way. Or both. Almost certainly both.
And now that he’s about to be released from prison, the hunt for The Burier is starting all over again. Unless he starts hunting for them, first.
Escape Rating A: I’m not joking about the utterly mesmerizing four hours it took me to read this from beginning to end. I think the only times I moved were to adjust my legs to accommodate whichever cat had nestled into my lap and frankly I was glad of the comfort.
A comfort I desperately needed, because comfort is absolutely the last word I would use to describe this book OR the series from which it sprang. Compelling, yes. Fascinating, also yes. Riveting, absolutely. But comforting, no, not even in the ending which is not so much cathartic or relieving as merely a sigh and a pause between this story and the fresh hell that its unanswered questions inevitably lead to.
This is a hard book, and that’s made it difficult to get my thoughts into order and pour them out through my keyboard.
Why?
Because there are at least three elements to the taut suspense of this thriller, and each one is more of everything than the last. Surprisingly, the case of The Burier, with all of its chilling and even visceral horror, isn’t the worst of what the characters face.
Except for Henley, none of the current members of the SCU were involved in the original case. And Henley’s involvement was as a witness and victim-by-association. Whatever guilt she may feel – however much she might second guess her behavior then – she wasn’t actually responsible for any of the events – and neither are any of the other current members of the team.
It didn’t happen on their watch – although they are being held accountable for cleaning up the rather obvious black eye that has materialized on the face of the Met as a result of it.
Which is where the story veers into the worse, because it’s not just that Streeter was framed then. It’s that their deceased boss, their mentor, is being framed now, that his handling of the case then is responsible for this miscarriage of justice.
Unless, he wasn’t the bent copper who focused the case on Streeter, manipulated evidence and witnesses and knowingly put the wrong man in jail. A possibility that seems even more obvious as the way that the present case has been dumped in their collective laps has made it crystal clear that the Serial Crime Unit has an enemy within the Met who absolutely is out to get them all.
The question of who, what, when, where and why of that fact, while less terrible in the blood and guts sense, is a bigger and worser question for a unit that sees each other as family – whether that’s healthy or not – and sees that they are all falling over the edge in one way or another. Watching each other fall apart, knowing that someone has a figurative knife in their backs even as they investigate a killer who literally stabs his victims before he does the rest of his terrible work ratchets up the tension of this case even as it powers the story straight into the next book – which we’ll probably have to wait a nail-biting two years for.
A fact which makes this reader want to curse even more than the characters in the story do.
