A killer who cuts straight to the bone…

A CHILLING MURDER

When a convicted killer is released and later found brutally murdered, DI Henley and the Serial Crimes Unit are pulled into a deadly investigation with links to other recent attacks – all the victims are connected by the vicious signature left behind by the killer.

A KILLER LURKS

Henley and her team begin to connect the dots between the killings, and realize the murders are part of something more sinister. Each victim has been chosen with a deadly precision, their deaths carved out with a shocking cruelty.

THE HUNT IS ON …

As the rampage continues and the case spirals into a terrifying hunt for the killer, the line between predator and prey begins to blur. Henley and the SCU are running out of time… Can they outsmart a monster before they strike again?

My Review:

The Met’s (that’s the Metropolitan Police of London to us Yanks) Serial Crimes Unit just can’t seem to catch a break. (Or this is absolutely the correct book to review on the second Friday the 13th of this year as if it wasn’t for bad luck there have been entirely too many occasions when the SCU wouldn’t have any luck at all.)

On the one side, there’s their own higher-ups at Scotland Yard, expecting the SCU to investigate serial crime cases for pretty much all of the UK with just four cops in the unit.Which means that their official charge is to take ONLY those cases that might realistically be serial crimes – but then their “Guv” gets hauled down to HQ to justify their “prima donna” cherry-picking.

When they take cases on the fringes, their boss gets called in to explain why they’re not solving cases fast enough. With a four-investigator team covering all of the UK.

Catch-22 at its finest.

Of course, when a whole bunch of seemingly disparate cases is finally classed as a serial, they catch the blame from all sides. For all of the bureaucratic malarky reasons above. Even as the unit is constantly threatened with disbandment every budget cycle if not more often.

So when the SCU is called into investigate what looks like a violent home invasion, DC Ramouter and his senior partner, DI Anjelica Henley, don’t believe that it’s one of their cases. Not that the SCU isn’t investigating a series of aggravated home invasions, but the MO for this case isn’t the same as their case.

Which doesn’t mean that they don’t both have a gut reaction to the case. It might not be part of the case they currently have on deck, but it might still be one of theirs. If so, it’s something new.

It turns out to be something old. Older than the hills. Admittedly, our hills rather than theirs. Not that either vigilante justice, which is the iceberg they’ve just crashed into, or scalping – the calling card the killers leave behind – are uniquely American phenomenons.

The case, which begins as what appears to be an interrupted home invasion, exposes a long-running series of murders that pretend that they are about justice. And maybe they started out that way.

Every victim, going back decades and halfway across the country, was the perpetrator of a heinous crime who should have gone to prison. But in each of these cases the criminal justice system failed the real victims, either through the excellent defense that can be bought with privilege and money, or through skillful manipulation of a jury by a seemingly sympathetic and harmless defendant, or simply due to a system that is overcrowded and overworked and of necessity plea bargains cases to keep those cases from taxing the court system even further.

Many see justice denied due to various technicalities and manipulations as a crime in itself. In the case that has landed in the SCU’s lap, someone, or more likely a small group of someones, calling themselves “Iron Shadow” has taken those miscarriages of justice to a new and deadly level.

Now that the SCU has them in their crosshairs, the Iron Shadow has the SCU in theirs. And have decided that the SCU is merely a cog in the wheel that has already failed them. And consequently deserves whatever punishment the Iron Shadow deems necessary to get them out of the way of their righteous crusade.

Escape Rating A: I’ve been waiting for this book for two years – and it was worth the wait.

The reason it was worth that wait is that the series, so far, hits a fascinating set of sweet spots for this reader – in spite of the blood and gore that the SCU’s cases so often nearly drown in. The Inspector Anjelica Henley series is definitely suspense thriller, a genre that often trips over the line of being too tension driven and not-enough-story for this reader. But this series makes it work by grounding the whole thing as a police procedural. I don’t want to be in a serial killer’s head – ever – but I’m more than willing to follow the investigator or detective hunting them down.

The cases, so far in the series (The Jigsaw Man, The Binding Room, The Kill List) have all been taut thrillers, with the members of the SCU, particularly Henley, always on someone’s “kill list” both literally and figuratively.

This particular case is especially riveting for the way that it’s not theirs, and not theirs, and not theirs exactly and then the investigation turns up more bodies in the past even as more bodies drop in the present and suddenly it’s not only THEIRS but it’s more horrific than anyone imagined. While the actual perpetrators seem so far removed from the horrors they are responsible that even the SCU wonders whether they’ll be able to link them to their crimes or whether they, too, will escape on a technicality.

The cop shop vibe is part of what I read police procedural series FOR, and the SCU is very much like a dysfunctional family. I want things to get better for each of them – but they’re a bit co-dependent on each other’s messes even as they get the job done. To the point where I’m surprised that the unit hasn’t been broken up for their own good.

AND wondering how much more dysfunctional they’re going to get in the next book, because there’s now a cuckoo in their nest. The Met may not have money for additional detectives for the unit, but that doesn’t mean that a unit somewhere else can’t pay to get a problem off their hands by seconding them to the SCU. Which is exactly what it looks like has occurred during this case and I’m sure it’s going to have chaotic, disruptive consequences down the line.

And so is Henley. But in this case, their new detective’s hot-headed glory-grabbing helps to bring their quarry to justice. Unless, of course, they buy really good lawyers and take advantage of the system they claim to be flawed and broken beyond redemption.

The Shadow Carver, like the previous books in the series, was a riveting read that kept me awake until I turned the last page – and a bit after as it took awhile to recover from the tension of the whole thing! And now I’m sad that I probably have another two years to wait for the next book.

I confess that I hope that at least a few of the cases that Henley and company face in the future will be just cases and not directly target the team. They’re dysfunctional enough that they don’t need an enemy from without every time as they have PLENTY of ways to hurt each other without making new enemies. But that’s mostly a hope from a reader who would like to see them get their shit just a bit together, because I like them all – except that cuckoo in the nest – and want the best for them so they can be the best at catching their quarry.

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.