The body of a young girl is found buried in the sand in the same area where another girl’s body was found several years before. But the murderer of the first victim was caught and died in prison, so he couldn’t have killed the second girl, leaving the question: did they arrest the right man?
I loved Better the Blood, and was hoping the author would give me more stories with these characters, so I grabbed this book from my library as soon as I saw it.
It did not disappoint.
Having quit working with the police department at the end of the first book, Hana has moved back in with her dad and is now working as a private investigator. She has a friend who quit the force a few years ago to work as a PI and he tends to send her easy work and overpay her for it. It’s only occasionally, so it’s not exactly enough to keep the lights on, but it’s better than nothing.
She’s also been helping out her dad at the community center he’s running, helping local kids get ready for their driver’s test so they can drive legally, which improves their employment prospects.
Unfortunately, her nephew is one of the kids she’s trying to help, and he’s less than grateful. His mom wasn’t OK with Hana going to work for the police department, and Hana quitting the department has not softened her to Hana.
So, Hana finds herself in a tricky situation when she discovers her nephew has gotten involved with some local kids who steal cars and farm equipment so they can sell them for parts.
The cop in her knows she should report this immediately, but she also knows doing so will ruin her nephew’s life and cement his mother’s ill will toward her.
She manages to take a video of the crime, and rather than going to the cops, shows it to her sister first. It doesn’t fix things between them, but it does appear to be a start, since her sister knows what else Hana could have done with that footage and what it meant for her to show it to her instead.
But all that is secondary to the murder mystery.
As with Better the Blood, the crime is reminiscent of a past crime, although there’s much less time between the two crimes in this book than the crimes in the Better the Blood. In this book, both murders took place in Hana’s lifetime. The first time when she was still a student, the second body her daughter found.
In Better the Blood, we got to see the murderer’s thoughts and motivations as he was planning his subsequent murders. We kind of get to see that in this one, although I don’t want to spoil the ending for you, so I think that’s really all I can say. I will say that we see it to a much lesser extent than in the prequel.
One thing I did like about this book is the fact that we get input from the victim (the second victim, not the first.) She doesn’t tell us who did it, but she does talk about her life leading up to her murder, and she does tell us that it wasn’t her ex-boyfriend, since that’s always the most likely culprit and they did have a violent falling out shortly before she was murdered.
Hana’s daughter, Addison, is still dealing with the trauma of having been a target of the killer in the first book, and having gotten so close to him without realizing she was talking to a serial killer.
In this book she develops an unhealthy obsession with the second murder victim, to the point where she starts wearing clothes and jewelry similar to clothes and jewelry she was wearing in a photo taken before she went missing.
I had a hard time getting on board with Addison’s behavior in this book. I know trauma can make us do all sorts of weird things, and she’s still pretty young, but this obsession with a girl she never knew, combined with treating her friend PLUS 1 like they’re expendable, made it really hard for me to root for her.
Fortunately, Addison does come to her senses before the end of the book, and that’s all I have to say about the ending.