Gus Freeman’s Crime Review Team has two successful cold-case investigations behind them. Will it be third time lucky?
The victim’s profession might make it hard to find someone to talk. Laura Mallinder left home for work on Sunday, June 12, 2011. She walked to Gentle Touch, a massage parlor in Broadgreen, Swindon. Her boss, Maggie Monk, discovered her body later that evening. Laura, twenty-seven-years-old, sustained fatal stab wounds to her back.
Meanwhile, developments continue in ongoing cases, including their most recent case, in which Detective Sergeant Neil Davis’s father, Terry, came under the microscope. Was the former detective responsible for sending an innocent man to prison? Or did he follow orders from a superior officer?
And Detective Sergeant Alex Hardy continues his recovery from his motorcycle accident, hoping to soon take a more active role in the job he loves. Lydia Logan Barre grows closer to Alex and reveals the secret behind her reasons for abandoning her theatrical ambitions and joining the police.
A newly formed Crime Review Team is investigating cold cases that defied their colleagues.
Austerity cuts mean that Gus Freeman only has a team of three to assist him. Detective Sergeant Alex Hardy, a police pursuit motorcyclist, currently uses a wheelchair as he recovers from a high-speed accident. Detective Sergeant Neil Davis is a bright young detective, whose family members have served in the Wiltshire force for generations. Lydia Logan Barre, the forensic psychologist graduate, is attractive, outspoken, and fiercely competitive.
In his first case, Freeman soon found his footing after three years in retirement. Now a murderer awaits sentencing, and another cold-case file has landed on his desk. He must look into the case of Trudi Villiers, a twenty-six-year-old barmaid murdered as she walked home from the Ring O’Bells pub in October, 2003.
Trudi may have been a good-time girl with a string of lovers, but she was someone’s daughter, and Freeman wants his team to find the truth about what happened to her on that fateful night.
