It Should Have Been MeThe Informant
""...a stylish crime thriller... " "
Synopsis:
DC Jo Boden was eleven years old when her older sister, Sarah, was brutally murdered during her first year at university. Her boyfriend, Nathan Wade, was convicted of the killing.
Now, sixteen years later, Wade is being released on licence, and documentary film-maker Briony Rowe says she can prove his innocence.
The Boden family have never recovered from the tragedy, and they have always been certain that Wade is guilty. But Jo, who grew up believing her sister was perfect in every way, starts to question the evidence which put Wade behind bars, and comes to realise that Sarah harboured some very dark secrets of her own.
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Review:
Following the success of Susan Wilkins' dark and gripping Kaz Phelps trilogy, this psychological thriller comes with a great deal of expectation. Fortunately, Wilkins delivers. 'It Should Have Been Me' is a page-turning, heart-pounding novel. Wilkins has a terrific knack of creating well-rounded female protagonists. Kaz Phelps was wonderfully flawed and had the reader gripped. Jo Boden is quieter, subtler, but just as engaging and equally likeable. She's struggling to find her position in the police force as well as handling an unstable mother and the demons that have plagued her since childhood. It would have been easy for Jo to have been a copy of other tortured female lead characters, but Susan Wilkins is a fantastic writer and originality is her watch word. As Jo's image of her sister's perfect life begins to unravel, the tension mounts, and Wilkins wrong foots the reader on almost every page. This truly is a stylish crime thriller and the pace is relentless. I hope this is the first of a new series. We need stronger female leads like Jo Boden, and with Susan Wilkins' writing, we can hope for crime fiction at its very best to rival the likes of Lynda La Plante and Martina Cole.