{"id":6438,"date":"2025-05-20T07:02:19","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6438"},"modified":"2025-05-20T07:02:19","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:02:19","slug":"cara-hunter-making-a-killing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/cara-hunter-making-a-killing\/","title":{"rendered":"Cara Hunter: Making a Killing"},"content":{"rendered":"

DI Adam Fawley #7<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>If you haven\u2019t read the first book in this series, Close to Home, <\/em>please, read no further.\u00a0 Instead, go find a copy, and get as hooked on DI Adam Fawley as I am.\u00a0 Then, get caught up (it will only take a couple of days, I guarantee it) and dive into this one.\u00a0 Fawley is a detective in Oxford, England, and author Hunter supplies a character list at the beginning of each book, golden age style.\u00a0 It is helpful, as there are a lot of characters, and while the police characters are important, in Hunter\u2019s universe, story is all.\u00a0 So pull up a seat.<\/p>\n

***SPOILERS BELOW FOR BOOK ONE***<\/p>\n

The police ranks will be familiar to any reader of British crime novels or avid viewers of Britbox detective shows, but the storytelling here, while certainly utilizing traditional tropes and thriller-y twists you might find in a Harlan Coben novel, is pure 21st century.\u00a0 Hunter uses emails, newspaper clippings, photos, social media posts and text messages to tell her story.\u00a0 At times it feels like you are the detective as she makes you work a bit to parse out the story from her plethora of facts.\u00a0 I loved this, and it reminded me of Minette Walters, who wrote some stunning books in the 90\u2019s utilizing a similar method (one of which Hunter refers to in the text).<\/p>\n

The story follows the one in Close to Home, <\/em>which was about the disappearance of 8 year old Daisy Mason.\u00a0 Daisy had disappeared from an end of school year party and her mother ultimately was jailed for murder.\u00a0 As this novel opens, a body is discovered.\u00a0 There\u2019s a hair on it \u2013 not the corpse\u2019s \u2013 which turns out to be a match to little Daisy, who would now be sixteen years old. The detectives are gob smacked, to say the least, and the team who investigated the case, led by Fawley, is reassembled.\u00a0 Daisy and whoever she was with appear to have vanished from the face of the earth, and what\u2019s more, the police have no idea who the dead woman is that has been discovered.<\/p>\n

As they attempt to backtrack and reinvestigate their case, they reach out to all the central characters in the drama: Daisy\u2019s parents and her brother, her classmates and teachers. They begin to find small things they missed but they still aren\u2019t getting the complete picture.\u00a0 The reader is more fortunate as we are allowed access to Daisy\u2019s online diary.\u00a0 This along with other things they begin to discover starts to paint a complete picture of Daisy as a person and the reasons she may have disappeared. At the same time, there\u2019s a film company that wants to make a true crime type documentary about the case, and the correspondence between the producers and researchers is also included.<\/p>\n

Much of Hunter\u2019s story telling genius is thanks to her excellent pacing, but it\u2019s also due to the way she creates fully dimensional characters.\u00a0 Daisy is a whopper of a character, complex and unforgettable.\u00a0 Her inner life is beautifully and subtly drawn by Hunter, and it\u2019s pretty chilling.\u00a0 The other part of these books that\u2019s indelible is Hunter\u2019s play on perception and point of view.\u00a0 Sometimes, the detectives find, it\u2019s their perceptions that were off, or the point of view they were taking was not quite the right one.\u00a0 This also applies to the reader, and it\u2019s a somewhat unsettling as well as a completely immersive experience.<\/p>\n

These are the kind of thrillers you polish off in a day or two, and think about for quite a bit longer.\u00a0 I cannot recommend them more highly.\u00a0\u00a0— Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DI Adam Fawley #7 If you haven\u2019t read the first book in this series, Close to Home, please, read no further.\u00a0 Instead, go find a copy, and get as hooked on DI Adam Fawley as I am.\u00a0 Then, get caught up (it will only take a couple of days, I guarantee it) and dive into … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1654,1655,2122,2123,8,1276,1970,291],"class_list":["post-6438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-adam-fawley","tag-cara-hunter","tag-making-a-killing","tag-oxford-england","tag-police","tag-robin-agnew","tag-thriller","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6440,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6438\/revisions\/6440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}