Perfect Kill - Helen Shields

Reading Challenge Category: 6th Book in the series

Official Blurb:

He had never heard himself scream before. It was terrifying.
Alone, trapped in the darkness and with no way out, Bart Campbell knows that his chances of being found alive are slim.
Drugged and kidnapped, the realisation soon dawns that he’s been locked inside a shipping container far from his Edinburgh home. But what Bart doesn’t yet know is that he’s now heading for France where his unspeakable fate is already sealed…
DCI Ava Turner and DI Luc Callanach are working on separate cases that soon collide as it becomes clear that the men and women being shipped to France are being traded for women trafficked into Scotland.
With so many lives at stake, they face an impossible task – but there’s no option of failure when Bart and so many others will soon be dead…

My Thoughts:

This was by far the best in the series.
At the end of book five, I complained that it had been too heavy on the relationships and hadn’t focused enough on the crimes taking place. So, I took a small break before starting this one. That certainly helped, but so did the correct balance between storylines in this book.
Ava and Luc’s relationship is in there, but it isn’t too in your face, and the heinous crimes still take centre stage. I’m not sure what Natasha’s storyline brought to the book other than her being someone Luc could channel whilst undercover. I think it is also setting the way for the next book.
In this book, we get to see plenty of what the victims are going through, and it leaves us horrified. I liked the intermingling of the crimes throughout; it worked really well. We don’t see the perpetrator’s point of view, but we didn’t need to for this plot.
The only downside to the whole book was some of the action scenes. They were overcomplicated, and hard to imagine and visualise what was happening. I sort of had to just go with it and see where they ended up. Were people dead, arrested, knocked out etc.?
Overall, though, this was the best book, and I sped through it. I have the next book in the series ready to read as an ARC, but again to savour this one, I will take a small break before reading it.