Sarah Reviews… The Body In The Mist By Nick Louth

Title: The Body In The Mist

Author: Nick Louth

Publisher: Canelo

Publication Date: 20^th May 2019

Format: eARC

This book was received from the publisher in return for an honest review

About the book:

A brutal murder hints at a terrifying mystery, and this time it’s personal.

A body is found on a quiet lane in Exmoor, victim of a hit and run. He has no ID, no wallet, no phone, and – after being dragged along the road – no recognisable face.

Meanwhile, fresh from his last case, DCI Craig Gillard is unexpectedly called away to Devon on family business.

Gillard is soon embroiled when the car in question is traced to his aunt. As he delves deeper, a dark mystery reveals itself, haunted by family secrets, with repercussions Gillard could never have imagined.

The past has never been deadlier.

What I Thought:

Welcome back to SWB! This morning I’m delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for Nick Louth’s latest novel in the DCI Gillard series.

The Body In This Mist sees DCI Craig Gillard and his wife Sam having to confront Craig’s past as a hit and run on a misty country lane in Devon leads to the aunts he hasn’t seen in years reaching out for help.

I really enjoyed The Body In The Mist, for me it was an interesting take on a police procedural novel. While you’d normally expect the central character in the series to be leading the investigation, in this case due to the clear conflict of interest he’s relegated to the sidelines. Instead we’re introduced to Detective Inspector Jan Talantire of the Devon and Cornwall police who takes the lead on the police investigation into the hit and run death. This doesn’t mean that Craig barely features in the book, while he can’t play a substantial role in the current case, staying with his family stirs up secrets of the past. One in particular that has Craig concerned that his uncle, now living with Alzheimer’s may have once committed a crime. With the local force too stretched to even consider investigating the cold crime we follow Craig as he does a little investigating of his own.

The Body In The Mist is superbly paced with plenty of twists and turns along the way to keep the reader eager to find out the next bit of information, to discover the next clue and try to solve both the current and cold cases before the characters manage it. It certainly kept me up late at night, once I reached a certain point I just couldn’t put it down!

I really enjoyed catching up with both Craig and Sam again, theirs is a relationship I really enjoy, but for me a real strength of this book were the supporting characters. I enjoyed meeting the Devon and Cornwall police team, and I honestly didn’t mind that Craig wasn’t taking centre stage in the police investigation. I won’t go into detail too much, for fear of wandering into spoiler but Craig’s family were a highlight of this book for me. Now I’m not saying I liked them and I certainly wouldn’t want to be related to either of his aunts or his uncle but they brought so much to this story, the family history and the secrets, the reasons Craig hasn’t visited they all build up and add so much to the plot!

I was also pleasantly surprised by the setting of the story, I must confess I didn’t read the blurb, I just saw it was the next DCI Craig Gillard story and I was on-board so to discover the story was set in my home county of Devon was a bonus. I absolutely adore reading crime novels that are set somewhere I know well, for me it adds an extra layer of realism to the story. I’m lucky that I’m familiar with the big cities like London and Manchester and currently live just outside Edinburgh so there are plenty of crime fiction novels set in places I’m familiar with but very rarely do I read something set in Devon. I’m slightly less familiar with Barnstaple and North Devon, but I was born in the same hospital the body is taken too! My only slight complaint is at one point Exeter town centre is mention, it may be Devon’s county town but Exeter is very much a city, with an absolutely stunning cathedral to boot!

Final Thoughts

Nick Louth has put together another fantastic crime novel – that ending! I can’t wait to see what comes next for Craig, these books are well worth reading!

More DCI Gillard Novels – Via Goodreads

More Nick Louth on SWB

About The Author

Nick Louth is a best-selling thriller writer, award-winning financial journalist and an investment commentator. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. It was an experience at a medical conference in Amsterdam in 1992, while working for Reuters, that gave him the inspiration for Bite, which was self-published in 2007 and went on to become the UK No. 1 Kindle best- seller for several weeks in 2014 before being snapped up by Sphere. It has sold a third of a million copies, and been translated into six languages.

The terrorism thriller Heartbreaker was published in June 2014 and received critical acclaim from Amazon readers, with a 4.6 out of 5 stars on over 100 reviews. Mirror Mirror, subtitled ‘When evil and beauty collide’ was published in June 2016. The Body in the Marsh, a crime thriller, was published by Canelo in September 2017.

Freelance since 1998, he has been a regular contributor to the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle and Money Observer, and has published seven other books. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.