Detective Bec Pope is waiting in Heathrow departures when the call comes in: a body has been found in a quiet Bloomsbury cemetery. Her long-overdue holiday is over before it begins.

It’s no ordinary crime scene. The smartly-dressed young man hasn’t just been murdered. The killer has left a message – a pentagram, brutally carved into the dead man’s chest.

Then a second victim is discovered on a patch of scrubland in Bermondsey. Another young man, killed at midnight, just like the first.

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The same five-pointed symbol etched into his flesh.

Bec is on the hunt for a ruthless killer unlike any she’s faced before. If she is to crack the case, she must discover what the symbols mean. And why these victims were targeted.

With the press circling and the entire city on edge, Bec’s running out of time in a case that grows darker by the hour. She needs to stop the killer before midnight strikes – and another life is taken.

My Review

First of all let me say that if I was at the airport about to board a plane to New York with my family, and work rang, I would have ignored the call till I got to my destination. But Detective Bec Pope takes the call and cancels her holiday. Then her partner and his children do the same. I want to know whether they are covered by insurance, or whether the police are paying for the missed trip.

If Bec really was the only officer at the station capable of solving this case, then bring someone senior in from another force. Anyway, rant over, because this was a really good story.

In my youth I was fascinated by all things occult – weren’t we all in the 70s – seances, scary films, Dennis Wheatley books. I even studied it during my OU degree in the 2000s. Let me just say that I know a fair bit about pentagrams, Satanism and such – don’t ask – so I was surprised that no-one seemed to, apart from Kevin aka Acheron. And where’s the dark web when you need it? That surely would be the way to go. Or they could have consulted me! But I digress.

The Midnight Killer is a fast-paced, exciting read and personally I did not work out who the killer was until near the end. It’s very twisty, if a little far-fetched at times, but Bec is a great female lead with a good team around her. I would not have realised that this was part of a series if I didn’t know, as the book stands up well on its own. The main thing we discover is that her previous colleague Detective Miller was killed in the line of duty, and Bec initially struggles to accept his replacement.

If you like procedural crime thrillers, then The Midnight Killer is definitely for you. It would make a good TV series with someone like Vicky McClure in the lead. And what a cliffhanger! We’ll hopefully discover the outcome in the next book.

Many thanks to @ZooloosBT  for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

Jez Pinfold taught English and Film Studies in London for twenty years, including eight years as Head of English. Before landing in secondary teaching he had various jobs, including roadie, sound engineer, guitar tutor and teacher of English as a foreign language. After writing, his other passion is music. He plays guitar in a rowdy covers band currently called The Maverick Detectives, although they frequently change their name to avoid becoming too recognised and succumbing to the trappings of fame.

Book Links
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com
Purchase Link: https://mybook.to/midnightkiller-zbt