By Sarah Evans
Publisher/Year: Clan Destine Press/2021
Publisher overview
A freezer full of body parts is the tip of the criminal iceberg for intrepid Western Australian Detective Inspector Eve Rock.
Butchered bodies and their questionable use; a murdered man in a skip; a brazen multi-million-dollar haul from a safety deposit facility; thefts from a high-end jewellers and art galleries…
All in day’s work for Eve and her team.
The festive season has spawned a spate of bizarre crimes which, at least, reassures Eve that others’ bad habits far exceed her own. It also gives her a watertight excuse to avoid her dysfunctional family, and to spend time with her two gorgeous colleagues and would-be lovers, Quinn Fox and his son Adam. A win-win situation.
Eve usually relishes solving crimes, but she’s less keen when she’s the target and the boundaries between work and home become nastily blurred.
- Who are the strange people wandering around her digs late at night?
- Why is her mum the nun acting more weird than usual?
- Why is she such a pushover when it comes to the men in her life?
Reviewer: Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Meet Detective Inspector Eve Rock. Her festive season is not going according to plan. After her house and other prized possessions were blown up, she has had to move in with her mother, Sister Immaculata in St Immaculata’s School for Girls in Nedlands, Perth. Eve’s daughter Chastity is also living there, and things are a little tense. Sister Immaculata is not happy; Chastity is developing a crush on a man who is possibly her brother, and Eve cannot decide which of her two police colleagues Quinn Fox and his son Adam she prefers. Oh, and Eve invited her father Henry Talbot as well.
To escape the toxic tension, Eve arranges a callout with her sergeant. She arranges for Adam and Quinn Fox to be called out as well. But Eve’s strategic escape from family simply signifies the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. There’s crime aplenty to investigate: a freezer full of body parts, a jewellery theft, and a body in a skip. And Eve is seriously avoiding telling Chastity who her father is.
So, where did the body parts come from? Who stole the jewels, and what is Sister Immaculata hiding? Can Eve finally make a choice between Adam and Quinn? And who are the mysterious people hanging around the school at night? Eve falls out with Chastity, meets some fairly creepy people and avoids death in three car accidents in which she is deliberately targeted.
While I will never look at body art quite the same way again, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and have added the first in the series to my reading list. Who knew that investigating crime could be so complicated and so full of laugh out loud moments? Poor Eve, I do hope that her hair grows back:
‘ […]my hair had been singed so badly I’d had to shave it off so that I now resembled an orange bog brush.’