“They didn’t deserve to die”
- Book: Silent Voices (DI Lottie Parker #9)
- Location: Ireland
- Author: Patricia Gibney
Wow! What more can I say about the adrenaline rush and angst reading this story has caused! I feel like I have been chewed up and spat out! (in a good way, of course)
Over time, as I have been blog hopping and visiting the various site listings, I have come across several of the earlier books in this series, and I truly only wish that I had knuckled down and read them in their entirety, rather than leaving it until book #9 to make Lottie Parker’s acquaintance, as she is definitely my kind of woman, although I’m definitely not such an untidy and messy worker as she is! Having said that, Silent Voices is a totally self-contained story and from my personal perspective, worked great as a stand-alone, with any relevant backstory information working its way to the surface at the right time and in the right place.
The opening page drew me right into, whilst the intense, highly toxic and horrifying storyline held me in thrall until I almost forgot to breathe, and the ending was both explosive yet rather satisfying, at one and the same time. Oh! and that fourth criteria essential for a storyline like this – you can’t be dead – which Lottie only just about manages by the skin of her teeth!
Patricia Gibney definitely knows how to build a multi-layered, nail-biting, complex plot, which left me with just about everyone on my suspect list, and had me first crossing them off, then adding them back in, throughout the story, as the many twists and turns kept unravelling and changing the dynamics at a great rate of knots! The gripping storyline was well constructed, rich in atmosphere, detail and tension, with enough suspense to cause serious health issues for any reader, along with all those well-place red herrings which tripped me up time and again!
There was some skilfully written, intensely troubling and powerful narrative and dialogue, which was seamlessly woven together with authority and total confidence into a disturbing montage of human behaviour, which when unpicked, uncovered, touched on, and highlighted, so many of the social mores and issues of our times. Sorting out fact from fiction, the innocent from the guilty and the troubled from the aggressor, was a minefield of lies and deceit, which was emotionally draining and physically dangerous, often making it almost impossible for Lottie and her team to see the wood for the trees, through the many individual agendas and the maze of menacing thoughts and actions perpetrated by this cast of disparate characters.
The characters definitely make this story, in equal part with that highly textured plot. Leaving Lottie and her team of detectives aside for a moment, the remainder of this rather sprawling, multi-faceted cast were almost exclusively either physical or emotional wrecks, and often both! They led complex lives, mostly below the radar, lying came as second nature to them, and hidden agendas were accepted as the norm. Even those deserving of some support and help, really did nothing to endear me to them, or sad to say, made me want to invest in them. In fact they were so well defined and drawn in fully immersive and descriptive technicolour, that most of them made me cringe and feel the urge to jump into a cleansing shower as soon as they had left the room!
Lottie herself is a very down to earth, middle-aged widow. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, is definitely not averse to more than the occasional burst of bad language and is unreservedly outspoken in her thoughts about both her suspects, her team (including the man she is about to marry), and her superiors. She is a fierce defender of her children, although never so much that they don’t get a tongue lashing if she thinks they deserve it. I simply couldn’t make my mind up whether she cared two hoots about her team or not, and it looks as though, with the exception of her fiance Boyd, she is about to discover that she perhaps doesn’t know any of them as well as she thought she did! Between them, they have almost as many hang-ups and emotional complexities, as their counterparts operating on the other side of the thin blue line, however Lottie is usually so busy running around chasing her own tail, rather than working through things methodically, that she really hasn’t noticed their shortcomings and may not until it is too late. But by sheer tenacity, grit, determination and downright bloody-mindedness, she gets things done!
In the town of Ragmullin, “Revenge is definitely a dish best served cold”
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