Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley

Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine Matheson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine MathesonThe 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.

Review: The Binding Room by Nadine Matheson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: The Binding Room by Nadine MathesonThe Binding Room (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #2) by Nadine Matheson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley #2
Pages: 512
Published by Hanover Square Press on July 12, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Detective Anjelica Henley confronts a series of ritualistic murders in this heart-pounding thriller about race, power and the corrupt institutions that threaten us
When Detective Anjelica Henley is called to investigate the murder of a popular preacher in his own church, she discovers a second victim, tortured and tied to a bed in an upstairs room. He is alive, but barely, and his body shows signs of a dark religious ritual.
With a revolving list of suspects and the media spotlight firmly on her, Henley is left with more questions than answers as she attempts to untangle both crimes. But when another body appears, the case takes on a new urgency. Unless she can apprehend the killer, the next victim may just be Henley herself.
Drawing on her experiences as a criminal attorney, Nadine Matheson deftly explores issues of race, class and justice through an action-packed story that will hold you captive until the last terrifying page.

My Review:

This case is gruesome, Henley and her team are flailing around in the pitch dark, and someone might seriously be eaten by an actual grue before it’s finally wrapped up. There are plenty of other disgusting, creepy, crawly things eating plenty of the bodies, so a grue isn’t all that far outside the realms of terrible possibility this time around.

And it’s utterly riveting. So as much as the reader is creeped out and chilled to the bone, it’s impossible to turn one’s eyes away. No matter how much the stomach turns.

We first met DI Anjelica Henley in The Jigsaw Man, another heart-stopping, gruesome thriller where Henley and her team were both the investigators in a serial killer case AND potential victims.

It’s not a surprise that the aftermath of that case left them all with PTSD flashbacks. Nor it is a surprise that nearly all of their personal lives – which weren’t all that stable to begin with – seem to be in even more of a shambles.

Henley’s marriage is hanging by a thread, as is her ability to do her job. There’s too much grief and anger in her not-so-distant past and she can’t seem to let it out or find any closure for it – no matter how many sessions she attends with a therapist who keeps calling her on her bullshit. Of which there is rather a lot.

But it’s the case that draws the reader in, and sticks in both the mind and the queasy belly long after you turn the final page. If it is final – something I’m still wondering about.

It starts with a body. The dead body of a self-ordained preacher in the office of his more than a bit shady megachurch. But the thing that really kicks off this case is that the preacher’s body isn’t the only body in the church. As the cops sweep the building looking for clues, Henley discovers a locked room hidden inside a bland meeting room, and inside that room there’s another body. A body that’s clearly been starved for weeks and tortured before, during and after whatever else happened in that room.

And it’s somehow still alive – in spite of it’s ghastly appearance. But what’s it doing there? And how, by all that is or isn’t holy in that supposed house of worship, did it get into that room and why is it there in the first place?

Caleb Annan – known to his worshipful congregation as Annan the Prophet – is dead. When Henley starts digging into his life, she discovers plenty of reasons why someone might have wanted to kill the bastard, starting with his wife. But nothing explains what that battered young man was doing bound to a bed and locked into that torture cell.

But the closer that Henley gets to the answer, the more bodies that investigation uncovers. And the more pitch dark and gruesome the story gets. Until the scab is finally pulled all the way off and the maggots crawl out.

Escape Rating A: I can’t use words like “enjoy” when talking about the reading of The Binding Room, because this doesn’t feel like the kind of story one enjoys – or at least that I enjoy. It’s the kind of story that has me on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, holding down my gorge and making sure all the lights are on. It’s compelling in the way that does not let the reader turn their eyes away because what it at its heart is a display of the many brutal ways in which human beings seriously suck and are entirely too capable of committing terrible evil in the name of the so-called “greater good”.

There are two cases here. The first, and the one that the powers that be would much prefer be the more prominent case, is the murder of Caleb Annan. That’s partly because he appears to be a pillar of the community and more than a bit because no matter what it seems like he was hiding – and he most definitely was hiding a whole lot – it’s a relatively straightforward case.

And there are the optics of the case, that Caleb was a black man, while the barely alive John Doe who was found hidden in the church is white. It seems like the press would rather follow the case of a missing white man rather than a dead black man – and there are plenty of political hacks willing to ride that angle as far as it will get them.

There’s also the problem that the more Henley discovers about that preacher, the less that any of the cops are able to see him as the victim of a crime. If he weren’t already dead, they’d be prosecuting his ass for everything they could get.

The other thing that hides under that surface is that the case of John Doe is a murky monster concealed under a whole lot of oozing muck. He’s not been reported missing, he has no identification, he was clearly tortured, and no one seems to be looking for him. And while he may have been found alone in that room, the more Henley digs the more she realizes that he was not the only victim of something so vile that no one wants to examine it closely. Or at all.

But she has no choice but to keep turning over rocks to see just how much slime crawls out.

That in the middle of all this her life and her marriage are still falling apart just adds to the ratcheting sense of danger and threat all the way around.

The Binding Room is a story to be read with all the lights on – and possibly a comfort animal or two or ten cuddled around. Because it’s not really about that simple murder. It’s a case about the evil that men and women do and it gets under the reader’s skin and just oozes and you can’t stop wanting to scratch it away.

It’s clear from the way that The Binding Room concludes that this will not be the final case for DI Anjelica Henley and the Serial Crimes Unit. Whenever the next book in the series comes out, I know I’m going to feel compelled to read it – and very possibly in one sitting as I did this one. Because I expect it to be another riveting, edge-of-the-seat, stomach churning read.

Review: The Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: The Jigsaw Man by Nadine MathesonThe Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley #1
Pages: 496
Published by Hanover Square Press on March 16, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...
When body parts are found on the banks of the River Thames in Deptford, DI Angelica Henley is tasked with finding the killer. Eerie echoes of previous crimes lead Henley to question Peter Olivier, aka The Jigsaw Killer, who is currently serving a life sentence for a series of horrific murders.
When a severed head is delivered to Henley's home, she realises that the copycat is taking a personal interest in her and that the victims have not been chosen at random.
To catch the killer, Henley must confront her own demons - - and when Olivier escapes from prison, she finds herself up against not one serial killer, but two.

My Review:

There’s a tension-filled junction where mystery, suspense and thriller meet – and fight it out with guns, knives and in this particular case, saws. Particularly jigsaws and ripsaws. But saws. Definitely saws.

This is a story that will have readers on the edge of their seats, wringing their hands in sympathy with Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley of the London Metropolitan Police Serial Crimes Unit as she comes to the chilling realization that she is the mouse in a cat and mouse game with not just one but two serial killers.

Killers who are determined to out-do each other in a bid for Anj’s attention. As if her life wasn’t already fraught enough – and not just because everyone, including some versions of the blurb for this book centered around her as she falls apart – misspells her damn name.

It begins when Anj, on her way to work at the SCU, is diverted to a crime scene for the first time in two plus years by her boss. Who also happens to be her on-again, off-again lover. As she’s on her way to work after yet another in a series of seemingly endless arguments with her husband about the consuming nature of her job, she’s already on edge when she arrives at the crime scene to discover that the body that’s been discovered is in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle.

The calling card of the serial killer who tried to gut Anj like a fish when he resisted arrest two years ago.

Anj has been investigating cold cases ever since, at least until now. She’s still suffering from PTSD and panic attacks. And her assailant, Peter Olivier, is in a high security prison serving seven consecutive life sentences.

But there’s someone out there either doing Olivier’s bidding or desperately seeking his “master’s” attention. Someone who has discovered the best way to get that attention – by grabbing the place in DI Angelica Henley’s mind that remains hyper-focused on Peter Olivier.

Who simply won’t be having that. At all.

Escape Rating A+: The Jigsaw Man is sitting right on that extremely uncomfortable crossroads. Which makes it an absolutely compelling, can’t put it down kind of story, whether you see it as mystery or suspense or thriller or all of the above.

It’s that “all of the above” factor that kept me up until 4 in the morning because I just had to finish.

This one combines police procedural – although a procedure that gets shot to hell fairly quickly and riddled with holes to begin with – with one of those stories that combines the gruesomeness of serial killer stories with the suspense of stories where the investigator is an integral part of the crime spree.

In that regard, The Jigsaw Man reminded me a lot of The Silence of the White City by Eva Garcia Saenz, Who Watcheth by Helene Tursten and the Frieda Klein series by Nicci French. All of those mysteries include serial killers who are thought to be out of commission in one way or another and detectives who are forced into the conclusion that their deaths or prison terms were mistaken, reports of their deaths were greatly exaggerated, that the police had the wrong person in prison or very nearly all of the above.

The personal stakes for the detectives in all of these cases ratchet up the stakes and the tension as the investigators find themselves unravelling, looking over their shoulders at things and people they thought were safe – only to discover that nothing was as it seemed. As does Anjelica Henley in this book.

DI Henley’s plight in The Jigsaw Man is particularly fraught. Her marriage is falling apart, her father has dropped into a deep clinical depression and, her mind and body are betraying her. Her career feels like it’s all she has left – and it’s killing her even as not one but two serial killers see her as the cherry on top of their killing spree sundae.

The Jigsaw Man is one of those mystery thrillers that is impossible to put down. The way that this story morphs from a hunt for a serial killer to a hunt for his copycat to a desperate search for competing serial killers along with their hunt for each other grabs the reader and quite honestly puts the reader’s own fingers in their mouth so they can bite their nails to the quick in anticipation and rising dread.

At the same time, we see Anjelica spiraling out of control as the crime spree is rising up to engulf her. We want to help her, want her to get help, and need her to put an end to it before it puts an end to her. And yet…

Some of the descriptions of this book lead one to believe that it’s the first of a series. I very much hope that it is, because while this series of crimes is solved, it’s clear that there’s plenty of unfinished business swirling around DI Henley and the serial killer who brought her to this point.

I want more of Henley’s story and I’m dead certain that other readers will, too.