Book Review: The Murder Tree by Caro Ramsay

 Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook, free of charge, from Joffe Publishing via their Arc program, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it. All opinions are my owning 

Four siblings. Three dead bodies. One twisted bloodline.

Synopsis:

DCI Christine Caplan should be celebrating her daughter's wedding. Instead, a journalist gives her a lead on a potential murder case with four whispered words: Witness protection. Suspicious death.

The dead woman is Juniper Greene — a recluse found alone in her cottage, the doors locked from the inside. Officially, nobody cares. And since Caplan's team is days from being shut down, she has nothing to lose by following the faintest trace of evidence.

What surfaces is a family that shouldn't still exist. Four estranged siblings—two buried, two vanished or living under names that aren't their own. One by one, these relatives are being picked off.

It isn't a family tree.

It's a murder tree.

And someone is chopping it back to the roots.

Caplan has to save the survivors. But can she find them before the killer?

Review:

This is book 5 of the series, and Caro is off to her daughter's wedding and some welcome downtime, before her unit gets scuttled. But while she's there, she gets approached by a journalist she knows, who gives her a cryptic message about an apparently closed case. With not much for her team to do, she starts them looking into the case to see if anything might be amiss. But when they realize Greene had changed her name, suddenly they find more deaths, of siblings in one family, and all appeared to be normal and have been closed. But were they? As her team goes over the files, they realize vital clues were missed and so is one of the siblings. Can they find them before the murder strikes again? With lots of red herrings and a very tangled web, this one will keep you reading late into the night, so be warned

About the Author:

CARO RAMSAY is the Glaswegian author of the critically acclaimed Anderson and Costello series, the first of which, Absolution, was shortlisted for the CWA's New Blood Dagger for best debut of the year. The ninth book in the series, The Suffering of Strangers, was longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize 2018. @CaroRamsayBooks | caroramsay.com