‘Reprobation’ by Catherine Fearns is the first book of a trilogy. It is also a debut novel which is a police procedural and a member of the public aids them in the case. That’s only the top layer of this novel, once you begin reading you realise it a lot more than ‘just’ a police procedural.
D.I Darren Swift has just been promoted and sent to a station in Liverpool where he worked previously. He has his first murder case and he is paired with D.C Colette Quinn. It isn’t the easiest of cases, a corpse, strangled and nailed to a cross with unusual religious scripture and left on a beach. They enlist the help of a Calvinist nun, Dr Helen Hope, as she can aid in the religious words left at this crime scene and others. Helen becomes so curious she decides to investigate herself. While in the process of this, she meets and makes an odd friendship with Mikko Christensen, a Death Metal frontman.
I found Helen an interesting character for several reasons, the main one being her beliefs. This brings a different tangent to the book and one that had me thinking about the moral dilemmas Helen faced. As I said a truly different book that has many layers and if you are a reader that like me, enjoys not just a cut and dried crime story, but one that has the possibility of questioning your own thoughts and beliefs, this is a book for you.
A well-written plot that has a unique take on a police procedural and that alone makes this an interesting and intriguing read.
Thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources and Catherine Fearns for the copy of this book to write my review today.
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