Customer Reviews

Dark Secrets

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"Dark Secrets" has a great plot. I was totally engrossed in it, and I really wanted to know the story behind the four bodies dug up in a wasteland years after they were buried. A belated eye witness account of one of the killings and the burial of the body is a tantalizing start to the book. The solving of the case does not disappoint at all.

This book does have some problems--at least for me. The writing is very formulaic as far as how the main characters live their private lives. I don't think the author had much trouble writing these parts as he could just lift them from all his previous books. One change in this book, however, is that Hennessey goes back to his neighborhood in London and meets an old acquaintance as he solves the murders. That made for a nice change.

The two main characters, detectives Hennessey and Yellich, are just not interesting characters though the author tries to invest their lives with both joys and sorrows. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes these characters more like cardboard cutouts than real people. Perhaps it is how they speak so formally to each other and everyone else. I also do not like the medical examiner, Louise D'Acre, who is Hennessey's love interest. Perhaps it is because of her overbearing attitude in keeping her relationship with Hennessey a secret. She is overbearing in other attitudes also, and this seems to be a requirement of women in that role in all the mysteries I read, and that is growing tiresome.

In this book too much time is spent on the autopsies. The "recovered memory" part of the plot is used for the second time by Turnbull, and neither time is it a convincing plot contrivance. Also, the word "warmly" is used so many times in this book to describe interactions between Hennessey and others that I feel like a halo of glowing light must encircle him wherever he goes.

Still, the plot is a good one, and the book is one you can zip through on your way to another mystery.