The Broken Ones

March 7, 2021 - By Corinne Rodrigues

I enjoyed Their Silent Graves, Book #7 of the Carla Kovach’s Detective Gina Harte series. So it was without hesitation that I decided to read and review I The Broken Ones, Book #8 in the series.

The Broken Ones

Amber applies a dash of red lipstick and checks herself out in the mirror before heading out on a date. ‘Don’t wait up!’ she calls to her housemates as she leaves. But Amber never returns home that night. Amber Slater is never seen again.

The last person to see Amber was her housemate. He remembers everything she was wearing that night. He watched her leave. He listened to every word of her phone conversation with her friend before she left. He knows more about Amber’s movements than anyone.

At university, she is well-liked by her fellow students and teachers. Her tutor’s voice shakes when he is questioned by the police. Some say he and Amber were very close. Too close. Some say his wife had just found out about their relationship.

The manager at the restaurant where Amber was supposed to eat that night says she didn’t show up. Yet the chef at the restaurant is overly chatty about her. He wasn’t working that night. He wasn’t answering his phone. Nobody knows where he was when Amber went missing.

Rumours begin to circulate about Amber, it seems that everyone has a story to tell. But when the young girl’s lifeless body is found in a local park, with her blue lips glued shut, the gossip suddenly goes quiet. As the police trace the last few hours of Amber’s life, it seems that the girl simply vanished on her way to catch her bus. And when another woman goes missing in the dead of night, it’s a race against time to find her before she too is silenced forever.

Fans of crime books from Angela Marsons, Cara Hunter and Clare Mackintosh will love The Broken Ones.

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My Review

As with Their Silent Graves, you needn’t have to read all the earlier books in the series to get into this one. However, if you have read the earlier books, you’ll find that The Broken Ones is equally enthralling and suspenseful.

Amber, a missing student is murdered and her lips cruelly sealed with super glue. Who could have committed this heinous crime? There are suspects aplenty. Could the killer be the girl’s professor, the barman at the place she was supposed to meet her date that evening or could it be the creepy man who discovered her body?

Detective Inspector Gina Harte and her team start to follow up on all the leads. But before they can solve the crime, another girl is missing, suspected kidnapped.

One of the possible ways that the perpetrator is connecting with these girls is via a dating app – a place where people let their guard down. I liked that the importance of cyber safety was underlined in this story.

In a clever bit of writing, all through the book, there is a parallel story being told by the perpetrator – someone with a terrible past and a twisted mind. He sets his sights on the women members of the police team too.

The reader is led down a winding path with clues popping up, only to turn out to be dead ends. It was only when the case was solved could I relax from reading this frightening and so possibly true story.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the inner workings of the police team, including the ongoing romantic interest between Gina and DCI Briggs. The humanness of the cops as shown in Kovach’s books make her stories even more real.

Carla Kovach’s writing is certainly highly recommended by me. If you like psychological thrillers, do check out this book and the entire series.

Meet The Author

Carla Kovach is a crime and horror author from Worcestershire. Her most popular work, the DI Gina Harte series is published by Bookouture. As well as books, she also writes stage and screenplays.

Connect with the author on her Website and Facebook | Twitter