Elizabeth Haynes - Behind Closed Doors

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent police thriller

I thought this was an excellent thriller/police procedural. It is well written and very gripping with some real substance to it.

This is the second in Elizabeth Haynes's DCI Louisa Smith series. I hadn't read the first but I found that didn't matter at all - this works fine as a stand-alone novel. The narrative is in two interlaced stories - Louisa's current investigations into organised-crime-related violence and the experience of Scarlett Rainsford who, ten years earlier at the age of 15, was abducted while on holiday and trafficked into the sex trade in Europe. The two stories are linked and develop very well.

The police procedural aspects are excellent: they felt completely authentic to me, as you might expect from Haynes, who has worked as a police intelligence analyst. The real strength of this book for me, though, was Scarlett's story. The horrifying reality of what "people trafficking" actually means is excellently evoked and I found the sections recounting Scarlett's story utterly gripping and convincing, with some real heart-pounding moments of tension, too. I found myself completely immersed in the whole thing and very keen to return and read some more at every opportunity.

Perhaps being hyper-critical, I was rather less keen on the parts to do Louisa's personal life, and I found the present-day investigation into organised crime rather hard to follow - especially as I was so bound up in Scarlett's story that coming back to trying to remember who was who in the various organisations seemed a bit of a distraction sometimes.

However, these are small things, they didn't really intrude and this was definitely a five-star read for me. It is engrossing, thrilling, very well written and has some very important things to say. Highly recommended.

(I received a free copy for review via Netgalley.)