Review: The Songbird Girls(Detective Tom Fabian #2) by Richard Parker

Her eyes were closed. From a distance the blood around her neck might have looked like a necklace, but up close her body told a different tale. She had been murdered. A tiny songbird lay beside her, its neck broken…

Detective Tom Fabian’s past is catching up with him. It has been years since the most famous case of his career – when his evidence put infamous serial killer Christopher Wisher behind bars forever. But when Wisher summons a reluctant Fabian to his prison cell to hand over a diary, he realises that Wisher’s twisted games are far from over.

Shortly after Fabian’s visit, Wisher is found dead in his cell. And a few days later, the police find a woman’s body bearing Wisher’s signature, a dead songbird. But the police never released this detail to the public … so who has Wisher been talking to?

Fabian is desperate to find the killer before another innocent life is taken. But as more bodies turn up, Fabian begins to realise that Wisher may have handed him the clues before he died. Is the twisted serial killer still pulling the strings from beyond the grave…?

Review

Whoa! I thought Never Say Goodbye was great but the second book in the Detective Tom Fabian series proved to be better.  The case begins where the last one ended. In this case, our Lead Detective is personally involved in the mystery. He gets drawn in when a convicted murderer summons him for a visit at the prison where the felon is being held. This visit opens the Pandora box and all hell breaks loose. Detective Fabian is soon trapped in a nightmare with no way out apart from catching the villain.

The tension is this narrative was palpable. Right from the beginning, it was clear that the case would be complex. Through alternating narrators, suspense escalates as danger looms. It was hard to predict the killer’s next move and this added to the intensity of the case. I was also curious to see how Detective Fabian would solve the case especially since it seemed like the killer was calling all the shots and leaving the investigators to catch up.

The Songbird Girls has everything that makes a cop procedural great. It has great detectives, a complex case, dark villains, twists and suspects that kept me guessing up to the last page. The ending was jaw dropping. I can’t wait for the next book in the series already.

 

Ps: This is my last blog post for 2018. Happy holidays to you all, have a merry Christmas and a brilliant 2019. Thanks for being part of my wonderful blogging experience in 2018.