I loved this book and sincerely hope that the review does it justice!
Deity by Steven Dunne. 2012. Headline. Paperback £6.99. 533pp. ISBN 978-0-7553-8368-9.
This book was simply awesome! Thanks to its extremely disturbing, original, story line and it being very well written, I was hooked right from the start and zipped through it really quickly. I love books that mess with my head and this one certainly did that.
DI Damen Brook is a far from happy man. He lives a lonely life, in a spartan cottage in Derbyshire, with an empty fridge, and lives to work, haunted by his failure to catch a serial killer known as The Reaper and still fragile after his mental breakdown. A body is discovered in a local river and thought to be a jumper until the autopsy reveals a distinct absence of lungs. Brook and his team check with funeral homes and mortuaries to ensure that no bodies have gone missing recently. Then the appearance of a second body in a similar state suggests this is the work of a particularly gruesome killer who likes to mummify his victims. Brook is determined to find the responsible party but is suddenly taken off the case when four college students go missing. Initially this is thought to be quite straightforward; the students’ passports are missing and it looks as if they have gone off on holiday together. However, Brook is not so sure and is convinced there is more to this case than meets the eye. The fact that all of the teenagers come from dysfunctional homes, and are struggling with more than the average amount of teenage angst, makes him fear the worst. Things come to a head when his own daughter, who is visiting for a short while, goes missing, and Brook is in a race against the clock to save her as well as himself.
This book deals very well with the traumas of growing up and discovering that life is not guaranteed to be the plain-sailing “do anything you want, darling” breeze that children are led to believe by well-meaning parents. It also focuses on how people crave their 15 minutes of fame and how some will do just about anything to get it. The twist at the end of DEITY is one of the best I have read for a long time. I thought that I had guessed the ending pretty early on and was simply delighted to be proved wrong. Happily, there are more books featuring DI Damen Brooks and I am really looking forward to getting my hands on them.
Extremely highly recommended.
