The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle is the first book in the Detective Jan Talantire series by award-winning, best-selling British author, Nick Louth. Just as she‘s thinking her dating app might have got it right with Adam, Detective Inspector Jan Talantire has to abandon the date to attend a grisly murder scene. The victim, in her sixties, has apparently already been dead over forty-eight hours when the inexperienced constable arrives and unintentionally contaminates the scene.

“A blood-drenched woman was lying spreadeagled but fully dressed on a kitchen table, with six inches of a crude iron crucifix protruding from her chest.”

With the CSI team busy elsewhere, Jan processes the scene with what she has available, even improvising to help get a time-of-death estimate. But things quickly get strange when one of her older colleagues points out that the woman, whose belongings identify her as Ruth Lyle, has the same name, manner and date of death as a sixteen-year-old girl murdered in the same place, fifty years earlier. A copycat killing?

If that’s not puzzling enough, fingerprints and DNA at the scene and on the weapon have Jan and her team questioning whether the original weapon (surely secured in police evidence?) has been used in this crime. And when they learn that the youth jailed for the murder in 1974 has been released some months earlier, they wonder if this is a copycat, or a repeat.

Hindering their investigation is the fact that, fifty years on, they can’t locate the physical evidence: has it been stored somewhere, or discarded? The case files, too, are difficult to locate: not digitised; maybe stored amongst a mess of cardboard boxes full of old files in a storage facility; maybe thrown out. And then the pathologist delivers a bombshell about this Ruth Lyle discovered during the autopsy. And another when the dental expert offers his opinion: curiouser and curiouser!

Jan is lucky to have a very competent team at her disposal, although the roadblocks they encounter are frustrating, especially when higher-ups interfere, but they do some excellent detective work. At a certain point, though, “She was looking at the end of her career. She had ignored her boss, gone out on a limb to make a high-profile arrest, and now it was all rebounding horribly upon her.”

This first instalment features name changes and stolen identities, blackmail with Polaroids, theft of evidence, drugs, reputation-destroying secrets, phone tracking, and a huge volume of fingerprint and DNA analysis. There’s enough intrigue to keep the reader guessing right up to the final reveals. Louth easily evokes his setting, and his characters and dialogue are thoroughly credible. More of this cast will be eagerly anticipated.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Canelo Crime.