Publication: 29th September 2022 – Quercus Books
A propulsive new thriller set in London featuring Detective Harbinder Kaur. A murderer hides in plain sight – in the police.
DS Cassie Fitzherbert has a secret – but it’s one she’s deleted from her memory. In the 1990s when she was at school, she and her friends killed a fellow pupil. Thirty years later, Cassie is happily married and loves her job as a police officer.
One day her husband persuades her to go to a school reunion and another ex-pupil, Garfield Rice, is found dead, supposedly from a drug overdose. As Garfield was an eminent MP and the investigation is high profile, it’s headed by Cassie’s new boss, DI Harbinder Kaur. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of her old friends has killed again.
Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies? It’s in Cassie’s interest to skew the investigation so that it looks like the latter and she seems to be succeeding.
Until someone else is killed…
I am a huge fan of Elly Griffiths’s novels, especially the Dr. Ruth Galloway series, but in the last couple of years I have also been really enjoying the Harbinder Kaur series. Bleeding Heart Yard is the third novel in the series and it’s as much gripping and suspenseful as the previous ones.
The protagonist is former DS Harbinder Kaur, now a DI in London Met and sharing a flat with two other women. She is called to Manor Park School where a school reunion as turned into a murder. The victim is a Conservative MP, Garfield Rice, and the cast of suspects include a famous actress, a rockstar, another politician, an aspiring author, the headmaster of the school, and one of the DS in Harbinder’s own team. Why them? The suspects and the victim were all part of what was known as the Group back in school, the golden kids everyone envied. As the investigation progresses, Harbinder starts to suspect that Garfield’s death is somehow connected to the death of another Manor Park student twenty-one years earlier. Back then, the police thought that his death was a drug-related accident, but then why everyone keeps bringing it up? And when another member of the Group is found murdered, Harbinder needs to find the killer before he kills again.
As in the previous novels, the story is told from different perspectives, all intriguing and interesting, but my favorite was Harbinder’s point of view because I have come to really like this character. She is smart and witty and, even though most of the plot focuses on the investigation, the author also gives us a glimpse into her new life in London as she tries to adapt not only to her new job and her new colleagues, but also to co-habitation with two women.
The plot is so well-developed and so full of twists that you never know what’s coming next. I loved how it all wrapped-up, not only with the investigation and the solution of the case, but also in Harbinder’s personal life and I am already looking forward to reading more about it in the next book!
A huge thank you to Quercus Books and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of the novel.
Elly Griffiths is the bestselling author of the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries and the Brighton Mysteries. She has won the CWA Dagger in the Library, has been shortlisted five times for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for The Lantern Men. Her new series featuring Detective Harbinder Kaur began with The Stranger Diaries, which was a Richard and Judy book club pick and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in the USA. The Postscript Murders followed and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Elly lives near Brighton with her archaeologist husband.
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