Why You'll Love This
Someone is luring vulnerable girls to their deaths inside London churches — and the police can't agree on whether it's even murder.
- Great if you want: gritty British procedurals with atmosphere and moral complexity
- The experience: brooding and methodical — church settings give it genuine unease
- The writing: Forbes builds dread through institutional friction, not just crime scenes
- Skip if: you prefer fast-paced thrillers over slow investigative builds
About This Book
In London, young women are dying — each body discovered inside a church, fallen from a great height, each death staged with an unsettling intimacy that blurs the line between suicide and something far darker. Detective Mark Tartaglia is working a case that resists easy answers, shadowed by media frenzy, departmental politics, and a killer whose motives feel almost devotional. Forbes builds her suspense not through relentless action but through accumulating dread — the sense that someone is selecting victims with patience and purpose, and that the investigation itself may be moving too slowly to matter.
What sets this debut apart is Forbes's commitment to atmosphere over spectacle. The London she renders is specific and slightly cold, her church settings genuinely unnerving rather than decoratively gothic. Tartaglia is a protagonist worth following — complicated without being tortured, professionally credible without being infallible. Forbes structures the novel to keep readers slightly off-balance, parceling out information in ways that feel organic rather than manipulative. For readers who prefer their crime fiction grounded in character and place, this is a strong and promising opening to the series.