Two Little Girls

a well written page turner which kept you guessing. Well described characters who were interesting and believable

One fateful day, a young girl is found strangled on a beach, lying next to a doll. This is reminiscent of a similar crime committed a couple of years previously when the victim was a young girl called Zoe and DI Simmonds is convinced there is a connection between the two cases. He is already racked with guilt from having failed to solve the first murder and is determined that the perpetrator is not going to escape again. Enter Jesse Flynn, a psychologist with plenty of demons of her own. When it transpires that a woman calling herself Laura is a patient of Jesse’s and that Laura is the mother of Zoe and one of the main suspects in the previous investigation, DI Simmonds and Jesse team up in a concerted effort to get to the bottom of these two tragic deaths.

Although I found the start a little slow, the pace did pick up as the plot progressed. I also thought it was a good premise for a psychological thriller and the storyline gave plenty of opportunities for quite clever twists.

However, I did not feel that the book really delivered on many of my expectations. The characters were often so extreme that I could not relate to them at all – I think a slightly more toned down cast list, whilst maintaining some of their wonderfully eccentric attributes, would have made the whole novel seem a little more realistic. In particular I struggled to get my head round Jesse Flynn, but she may have come across as a more cohesive character if I had read the previous two books in which she features. I also found most of the characters extremely unlikeable which didn’t help. Despite the fact that the pace did certainly gain some momentum, I still found that the book dragged at times, possibly because I didn’t really care too much about what happened to the majority of the main characters. Finally, I found the ending a little contrived and ultimately, not terribly feasible.

I had not come across Kate Medina before and, unfortunately, will probably not be seeking out any of her other books. Having said that, she generally gets very good reviews so I may be out on a limb here and would therefore hesitate to discourage others from reading her novels.