Oxford. Crime. Auntie M is so there. Here’s another roundup of a great series you might want to look for:
Cara Hunter’s DI Adam Fawley introduces a detective with an unusual background. In the debut mystery, Close to Home, Fawley and his team are called in to investigate the disappearance of eight-year-old Daisy Mason, when the girl vanishes during a party held in her family’s backyard.
It’s a barbecue of sorts, and a costume party. Daisy’s family strikes Fawley are weird, from her mother who is height of perfection to her distanced, cold father. And her younger brother won’t speak, or make eye contact.
It’s obvious there is an undercurrent here, and as his team sorts out the lies from the truth, his own home situation comes into play. And then there’s that twisted ending that will have you reaching for the next one in the series straightaway.
In the Dark takes Fawley and his team into a disturbing nightmare of a case. A woman and her young child are found locked in a basement room, with nothing to identify them. Barely surviving, the woman refuses to speak. Is she mute or terrified?
The elderly man who owns the house is confused and it seems he doesn’t know these two people, nor why they were in his basement. Has he lost the plot totally? Or is someone toying with him?
The is masterful plotting, with secrets being kept in a quiet Oxford street, right under the gaze of neighbors. Another winner with a startling resolution.
In No Way Out, it’s a sad Christmas for one family when their home burns down and children are lost. It appears at first glance that they were in the house alone. Where are their parents?
Trying to give the distraught grandparents answers, Fawley and his team race to find answers to these questions, especially after it’s deemed that this fire was set on purpose.
Another gripped mystery with a twisted ending, readable and compelling.
All the Rage makes residents of the streets of Oxford sit up and take notice when a young teen is attacked, a plastic bag thrown over her head, and she’s dragged away. Taken to a remote area, she somehow escapes.
Fawley’s team is cohesive now and his DC Eric Somer, can’t help but feel this young woman knows exactly who attacked her, but some obscure reason isn’t willing to say.
The case echoes a similar early string of cases and causes more than a few sleepless nights for Fawley. And at home things are ramping up, too, with threads to an earlier case.
The series is a winning combination of great cases with stealthy police investigation, coupled with the instincts of the team. There’s the sense that nothing is formulaic about this series.
While the mysteries are solved in each individual book, the hallmark of a great series is that the reader can follow the personal life of the detective, and Fawley certainly has his share of his personal past he and his wife are dealing with, parsed out over the course of the series in a highly effective way that do not detract from the individual book.
It’s an absorbing series, with the next book due out in February 2021. And Auntie M will be reading.
Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff 