Scenes like the mass grave or the horrific torture amphitheatre at the end were dealt with in just a few short sentences whereas they could have been developed into something much more spine-tingling with greater detail. The torture and imprisonment scenes are chilling and the descriptions of the perpetrators sometimes shift into the horror genre rather than crime fiction, but I found it less psychologically disturbing or gripping than many other titles that I've read because they were skimmed over. I've devoured a lot of crime fiction in my time but I've never read a novel with such a high body count (literally in the hundreds so you can't empathise with any of them as individuals) and so many bent cops. In many ways, the book leaves you at exactly the same place where it picked you up - Darby's will-they-won't-they romance with her soul mate Coop is still in limbo and, despite resolving a vast number of cold cases, there is no real closure for this killing spree because the criminals go to ground and are still at large, leaving messages for Darby wherever she goes so that she knows she can't escape them, however hard she tries. It's a dark, nail-biting, fast-paced read that I found unputdownable while I was racing through it, but once I'd finished, I was left feeling slightly unsatisfied on several counts.
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