The Burning by Jane Casey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a well written story. The writer deftly introduces and follows two cases being investigated, originally thought to be possibly connected. The book is written mostly using two points of view, that of Maeve Kerrigan, young detective constable, and Louise, a friend of the victim of one the cases. There is one chapter told through the perspective of another detective.
This is first and foremost a police procedural. There is just enough information about Maeve Kerrigan to get the reader invested in her as a character and flesh her out as a whole person. Her life is her work, but the glimpses we see of her with her boyfriend and her co-workers give us the sense of a character who can be fully developed in later series entries.
It was pretty easy to guess who did it–I rarely guess anything and found this pretty obvious. What wasn’t quite obvious was the why, although thinking back (and going back to read the earlier chapters once I finished the book) the groundwork had been laid for a believable reason.
The reason I am giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is chapter 15. Casey–having done an excellent job up to this point with character development, plot, scene setting, atmosphere, credibility–breaks one of the cardinal rules of writing and “tells rather than shows.” But the book was good enough for me to want to read further.
