Perfect Prey - Helen Fields

Reading Challenge Category: Book from Amazon Kindle Unlimited

Official Blurb:

Welcome to Edinburgh. Murder capital of Europe.
In the middle of a rock festival, a charity worker is sliced across the stomach. He dies minutes later. In a crowd of thousands, no one saw his attacker.
The following week, the body of a primary school teacher is found in a dumpster in an Edinburgh alley, strangled with her own woollen scarf.
D.I. Ava Turner and D.I. Luc Callanach have no leads and no motive – until around the city, graffitied on buildings, words appear describing each victim.
It’s only when they realise the words are being written before rather than after the murders, that they understand the killer is announcing his next victim…and the more innocent the better.

My Thoughts:

This is the second book in the DI Luc Callanach and DI Ava Turner series. I enjoyed the first one last week so much that I couldn’t wait to pick this one up.
I’m not sure how much time has passed between books one and two, but when I started reading this one, I felt like I’d missed a book as the dynamics between Luc and Ava had changed drastically. I left them in the previous book as allies and becoming friends, but they seemed like they had had some kind of falling out prior to this one. It took me a while to get into the book because of this, as I constantly felt like I’d missed something.
The book structure is slightly different, also. The one thing I’d liked about the first one was that we got an insight into the killer’s mind straight away. We (the reader) even find out who he is. In this one, Part One of the book is solely from Callanach’s perspective. In Part Two, we start to get more voices like Ava’s and the killers. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing not following the same structure; it was just different.
The murders in this are particularly gruesome, and reading this book is not for the faint-hearted! It was very well done, though and had your heart in your mouth knowing how vicious the killer could be. There were no holds barred!
There are a lot of intertwining storylines, and they all meshed well together and worked. The author did a fantastic job of intertwining everything but not losing sight of the overall story.
I enjoyed this book as much as the first I just wish I had some answers as to whether there was an intermittent book between one and two that I missed out on that made me feel a bit discombobulated at the beginning! So, this only gets four stars rather than the five it should have received.