Cold Kill is a real page turner – brilliantly plotted, believable characters straight out of normal life and a tight narrative. This was the first crime fiction by Neil White I’ve read and I am already thinking of more. A couple of my writer friends turned me towards this and I must say that I relished every bit of it.
The story is set in Blackley, a small county in Northern England where, three weeks apart, two young beautiful girls end up dead.
They have been sexually violated in most heinous of ways. Jack, a freelance reporter, is commissioned by a local daily to cover the story. Moved by the extremeness of the killings and seeking out a connection between the two dead women, he wakes up to an invisible smokescreen he was earlier oblivious of.
The police investigations go in circles and his girlfriend, Detective constable Laura, who is in the investigation squad, doesn’t share the details of the progress. As his desperation to do a good story makes him to uncover more layers and travel extra miles, he becomes a conduit for the killer to communicate with the police.
The killer is smart and to send his e mails to Mike he uses proxy servers they can’t locate. The dangling loose ends multiply as another woman ends up dead. With it the police realize that for once they would have to work with Mike. Together they churn the dirty waters of people’s past and soon enough skeletons come tumbling out.
I loved the persuasiveness of the narrative. This is a book you can’t put down. Just one thing that I found odd. Almost every character – most of all Laura –blushed a lot. In every situation. Someone should count the number of times the word has been used by Neil. I bet it would be over 100.