His Hand in the Storm
Crime, Mystery
Ritu Sethi
Inspector Gray Mystery, Book # 1
Self published
January 31st 2019
ebook from Netgalley
260
English
January 29, 2019 February 7, 2019
His team believes he’s calm and Zen. His boss finds him obsessive. Suspects think him gorgeous but dangerous. They’re all right.
Chief Inspector Gray James is sculpting the remembered likeness of his small son when he receives the call – a faceless corpse is found hanging by the choppy river, swirls of snow and sand rolling like tumbleweeds.
Montreal glitters: the cobbled streets slippery with ice, and the mighty St. Lawrence jetting eastward past the city. One by one, someone is killing the founders of a booming medical tech startup – propelling Gray into a downward spiral that shatters his hard-earned peace, that risks his very life, that threatens to force him to care and face what he has shunned all along: his hand in the storm.
From the prize-winning author comes a psychological, page-turning mystery with all the elements one needs on a rainy night: a complex murder, a noble yet haunted detective, and an evocative setting to sink into.
About the book
I would like to thank NetGalley and the author Ritu Sethi for my ARC in exchange for an honest review. I chose this book because I didn’t know the author. Obviously I read it in English.
First of all this book is set in Canada and this is a good book for that reason (do’t you know I love Canada?). Joking aside, this is the first book in a new series with Chief Inspector Gray, set in Montréal, Canada. I’ve already read a series set in “French Canada” but here there’s no French (except for two cases where there are long French sentences, not translated in English, but they aren’t part of the plot so no use in understanding them, but a translation would have been better).
Gray is a police inspector with a very good career, but with a sad past. His son died and his wife left three years before the time the book is set in. This backstory isn’t bad at all, but it is too slow. If the author had explained his story at the beginning instead of writing about it for all book long, I would have liked it better.
The case is interesting, I like books that directly or indirectly talk about medicine, vaccines, why people are so stupid to not vaccinate their kids, etc… so I was involved since the beginning.
Speaking about another non-main character (I mean a character that we probably won’t see again in the future), it was easy to understand her secret. I mean, I understood Holly’s secret as soon as she was on the phone with the wife.
As I said the book is a bit slow because the main character’s backstory but I really enjoyed it all together. I find that a kid is imprisoned in an institute, that he’s almost killed by his prison mates and the institute’s director does nothing to protect him even if the kid is a “criminal” (criminal with quotes because I don’t think the word is correct since his age and the crime he was accused of) is something hard to believe to be true, I mean I can’t accept that this stuff happens in the world
I liked the ending, I liked that I didn’t get the killer as soon as I started the book (maybe because it’s in English and I don’t pay much attention to details) so I read it quite easily.
Most likely I will read the next book in the series (at least to know what happens after this ending).
