Sarah Reviews… The Girls In The Water by Victoria Jenkins

Title: The Girls In The Water

Author: Victoria Jenkins

Publisher: Bookouture

Publication Date: 3^rd August 2017

Format: eBook

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

About the book:

When she woke, she found herself in darkness. She couldn’t move. She was going to die and she had no idea why…

Early one icy winter morning, Detective Alex King is called to a murder scene at a local park. The river is running high, and in the water lies the body of a woman, her wrists tied, and all her fingernails missing.

The victim, beautiful, young Lola Evans, had a troubled past, but Alex’s team can’t find a reason why anyone would want to kill her. The pressure to solve the case keeps mounting, but all their leads run dry.

Then, another body is found in the water.

A disturbing clue suggests how the girls are connected. But who would target such vulnerable girls, and does this mean another life is at risk? Just when Alex thinks she has cracked the case, she realises one of her own team is in terrible danger.

Alex is caught in a race against time to reach the next victim before it’s too late… and some of her team must face terrifying truths from their own lives if they’re to have a chance of catching the killer.

What I Thought:

I first read The Girls In The Water back in 2017, but for some reason it slipped through the cracks and I never reviewed it. I rated it a four on Goodreads at the time so I’d obviously enjoyed it. I have the next two books in the series on my Kindle waiting to be read and as I didn’t remember too much about this. So I thought I’d take advantage of my time off to reread ahead of getting started on the others.

DI Alex King and DC Chloe Lane are called to a scene when the body of a tortured young women washes up on the banks of a river running through the park next to Cardiff Castle. King and Lane face the daunting task of hunting down the killer, then a second woman is reported missing and the stakes get higher…

I thought this was a fantastic introduction to the series. The plot cleverly mixed two strands together, the main case and one with a personal link to DC Chloe Lane. At the same time Victoria manages to create a connection to the central characters which means by the time you reach the dramatic conclusion you’re invested and desperate for everything to work out.

Onto the characters, the story centres around DI Alex King and DC Chloe Lane and as a result these are the two characters I feel like I knew best by the time the story reached its conclusion. DI Alex King has been in post for a little while, we get a little background on her, the fact she’s divorced and struggled with fertility which is perhaps one of the reasons her marriage ended. The thing that interested me most about Alex’s history is something we only get small snippets of, the idea that some case went wrong, and nearly resulted in Alex resigning from the force. I NEED to know more about this, it sounds like it would make such a good book! Alex makes some questionable decisions regarding her ex, but who hasn’t done that! Overall I found her a really likeable character and competent detective.

Chloe was a really interesting character, I think that probably has a lot to do with the second plot strand that revolves around her and her history. No spoilers but the conclusion of her story was both thrilling and heartbreaking at the same time. Her backstory made me really feel so much for her. She definitely makes some unwise decisions and she pays the consequences for them, but if I was in her position, honestly I couldn’t swear I wouldn’t have done the same thing.

Final Thoughts

I’m certainly looking forward to catching up with the detectives again! This was a wonderful start to the series and I can’t wait to see what Victoria has in store for them next.

Detectives King and Lane – Via Goodreads

More Victoria Jenkins on SWB

About The Author

Victoria Jenkins is a Welsh author who has made a name for herself writing the highly popular Detective King and Lane series of novels. The first novel in the series was “The Girls In The Water” that Jenkins first published in 2017, to much critical acclaim and popularity among crime fiction fans.
The series of novels features Detective Constable Chloe Lane and Detective Inspector Alex King, who are the lead investigative characters that solve some mysterious murders in their hometown.

Jenkins lives with her husband and daughter in South Wales, where her series of crime novels featuring Detectives King and Lane is based.