Impeding Justice by Mel Comley

This is the second of the novels featuring DI Lorne Simpkins. Cruel Justice was the excellent start of the series and Impeding Justice is even more thrilling and gripping.  I absolutely loved it.

Lorne is still the feisty, stubborn, no-nonsense detective hunting down sadistic killers, still with a rocky marriage (being married to her husband and her job just isn’t easy) and still with a teenager who is being, well, a teenager.  To make matters worse, a tragedy hits her close-knit work team and her eight-year-long chase of her nemesis, The Unicorn, steps up a pace.  He has started to make it personal—very, very personal.

Comley packs action and tension into a package with strong characters along with heinous villains.  Lorne’s domestic life and problems therein remind us that she isn’t superwoman, but a keen and brave working wife and mother, with the police force in her blood, doing her best to make the streets a safer place.

This isn’t a book you can put down easily and Comley manages to leave you emotionally exhausted: appalled by man’s ability to be utterly depraved and violent, touched by the resistance and strength of innocent youth, totally wrung-out by the pain a mother feels for the suffering of her child.  Not only that, you are left hungering for more with an almighty cliffhanger.