Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose.

The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it.

#DeadlyAnimals #MarieTierney @Tr4cyF3nt0n #CompulsiveReaders #blogtour

But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant.

DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career. But Ava is not the sort of person who will step back and let someone else take charge when children like her are dying. She uses all her unusual skills and deep local knowledge to try to track down the serial killer in her community.

My Review

Omg! Omg! Omg! What a stunning debut novel! I loved this so much.

We have two perfect protagonists – 13-year-old Ava who has an unusual hobby, and investigating police officer DI Seth Delahaye. Ava goes out in the middle of the night, to look at the roadkill she keeps in her forest ‘lab’ to work out the rate at which they decompose and why. A future star of Silent Witness maybe? One night though, she finds more than she bargained for.

Delahaye is involved in the search for missing teenager Mickey Grant. He’s going to need help from the community – he only recently arrived from the Met – and Ava has the local knowledge and her unusual skills. But no-one will believe a child when she delivers her inside information, so she puts on an adult voice to call the police. Because she knows where the body is.

Her best friend is John – a bit older than her, and goes to a different school. They have a ‘War Room’ at his granddad’s house where they draw maps and plans and look at evidence. Because Mickey is only the first to be taken and they believe they can help.

Eva knows far more than her peers – which is one of the reasons she is bullied at school – including stuff about child killers, cannibals and lycanthropes. She knows that werewolves don’t actually exist, but there have been killers in the past who really believed that they turned into wolves at the full moon. It’s called ‘clinical lycanthropy’. Delahaye respects Ava’s knowledge and is prepared to investigate this phenomena, but then he has seen the bite marks on the bodies.

As well as Ava, we ‘meet’ the rest of her family – sisters Veronica and Rita, their awful mum Colleen, mum’s dodgy boyfriend Trevor (let me know if he does anything bad, Delahaye tells Ava), the kids at school and a host of others including Delahaye’s colleagues.

This is one of my favourite books of the year so far, and I am wondering if it’s going to be the first in a series.

Many thanks to @Tr4cyF3nt0n for inviting me to be part of the #CompulsiveReaders #blogtour 

About the Author

Marie Tierney lives in The Fens with her husband, son and two cats.