She must solve the ultimate riddle… DI Jan Talantire is called to a cottage in Ilfracombe, where the female occupant is found dead, impaled with a crucifix.

The woman, who had been renting the house for a few months, is well known locally. Documents found at her house indicate her name is Ruth Lyle. The name means nothing to the young PC who found her, but DI Talantire knows that this cannot be true.

Fifty years earlier, sixteen-year-old Ruth Lyle was murdered – stabbed by a crucifix, in exactly the same location. It is impossible for this to be the same woman, and yet all the records are a match.

With a brutal killer at large, DI Talantire must work quickly to solve the most complicated case of her how can a woman die twice?

My Review

This started off so well. A woman in her mid-sixties called Mrs Ruth Lyle is found stabbed to death with a crucifix, in her cottage in Ilfracombe. Aha! A crucifix! That sounds just up my street. I love a gory murder with religious undertones. Like the TV series Messiah in the 2000s.

But this murder is far more complex than a religion-obsessed lunatic on the loose. Because in 1973, a teenager named Ruth Lyle was stabbed to death – you guessed it – with a crucifix in exactly the same location. Except it wasn’t an Airbnb called Bluebird Cottage back then. It was known as The Dimpsy Chapel, previously St James Without (in other words St Philip and St James minus the Philip).

Detective Inspector Jan Talantire of the Devon and Cornwall police is in charge of the investigation. We are also introduced to her team – DS Maddy Moran, DC Dave Nuttall, new digital evidence officer Primrose Chen and DI Richard Lockhart, known as The Prince of Darkness because he always works the night shift. I expect they will all feature in the next book.

In 1973, Gawain Entwistle, a fifteen-year-old with learning difficulties, was sentenced to life for Ruth’s grisly murder. He has recently been released under a new, secret identity and lives miles away in the north of England, so did he return to commit the second murder? Jan doubts it, but many disagree with her.

There are a lot of characters in the book, a lot of red herrings, and a lot of suspects. It’s all quite complicated, with a huge twist, which we would never have guessed, and another which we all worked out. Pigeonhole readers that is. We read it together in ten ‘staves’ over ten days, so we got to play amateur detective.

And what a corker it could have been, if in the last ‘stave’ we weren’t given the entire explanation in a convenient confession. While it means you know exactly what happened, it’s not a plot device that I like. I also found it a bit dated at times compared to some of the new authors that I mainly read. However, I still enjoyed it immensely and the story was very interesting and clever.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author, and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read.

About the Author

Nick Louth is a million-selling thriller author, and an award winning journalist.

After graduating from the London School of Economics in 1979, he was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, working in New York, Amsterdam, London and Hong Kong. Freelance from 1998-2014, he wrote for the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle, Money Observer and MSN.

His Investors Chronicle piece ‘Making Sense of Chaos’ won the article of the year award from for the UK Chartered Financial Analysts Society in 2014. His numerous financial books are published by Harriman House Ltd.

The thriller Bite was self-published in 2007 before becoming an Amazon No1 best-seller in 2014, and being and translated into six languages. There followed standalone thrillers Heartbreaker and Mirror Mirror in 2016-17, and Trapped, in 2019.

The first DCI Craig Gillard book, The Body in the Marsh, was published by Canelo as an ebook and paperback in September 2017, and there followed eleven others. All are available as audiobook through WF Howes.

The first book in the DI Talantire series, The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle, is published in May 2024.