Review: The Night Caller

Posted 25th August 2019 by Emma in Reviews / 0 Comments

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Night Caller by J.M. Hewitt
Series: Detective Carrie Flynn #1
Published by Bookouture on 15th August 2019
Genres: Crime, Psychological, Thriller
Pages: 327
Format: eARC
Source: from Netgalley
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Detective Carrie Flynn has spent twenty years searching for her little sister, who was kidnapped and never found. The worst part for Carrie is that she was with Hattie on that hot summer day. Carrie saw her sister’s abductor, but she was just a little girl herself, and remembers nothing. She will never forgive herself for letting Hattie down.
When the chance came to join the police force, Carrie didn’t hesitate. She would solve missing person cases and fight for justice – no more families stuck in limbo, no more grieving mothers, no more sisters growing up alone... But now a serial killer is stalking Carrie’s hometown of Manchester: late at night, people are going missing down at the canal. Six years, a dozen disappearances.
When another victim is taken, Carrie is sure the family is hiding something and she’s determined to find out the secret behind their silence. Why does the mother not want to answer Carrie’s questions? Who is the mysterious girl next door? Carrie knows that to track down the killer, she must find out everything she possibly can about the innocents they have chosen to hunt.
Carrie holds on to one fact: last year, standing by the water, she caught a glimpse of the killer, and the distinctive tattoo on his arm. He slipped through her fingers, but she won’t let it happen again. She’ll never stop searching, for the grieving families, for her belief in justice, and her hope that, one day, something she finds will lead her back to her lost little sister.
Can she finally solve the case that has cast a long shadow over her career and will the demons in her own past help her to catch this deadly killer?
If you love Val McDermid, Robert Dugoni or Angela Marsons you won’t be able to put down this dark and twisty thriller. J.M. Hewitt will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Thanks to Bookouture for my copy of this book via netgalley.

Sadly I didn’t gel with this one. For me, the whole book was a slog. I couldn’t connect with the characters.

The book was more focused on the victim’s friends and family than the police work. I personally prefer seeing more of the police work. I would say this was more of a psychological thriller than a police procedural.

In the blurb, there is more about Carrie and her background than there probably is in the book. It would have been nice to see more of this in the story and to expand on Carrie’s background. This is barely mentioned in the book except for a paragraph or two at the very end. Carrie is very cold and difficult to identify with. She seems to keep herself very private from everyone she works with and doesn’t seem to know anything about her colleagues.

The twist was really obvious to me from quite early on as well which again made it difficult to read as I had nothing to keep me hooked.

The story is well written but it just wasn’t for me. I really wanted to like this one as I love a detective series but I just couldn’t enjoy it.

About J.M. Hewitt

J.M. Hewitt writes crime fiction and is the author of two previous crime fiction novels and has been published in two short story publications. Her work usually incorporates twentieth and twenty-first century events and far flung locations, and her novels explore the darker side of human behaviour.
In contrast to the sometimes dark content of her books, she lives in a seaside town in Suffolk with her dog, Marley.

When she was ten years old she’d read all the books she owned, all those on her mother’s bookcase and everything the library had to offer. She decided the only course of action to take was to write her own stories. Thirty years later, she is still writing them.