Dark Vows Kildevil Cove Murder Mysteries
Mystery, International Mystery
Dreamspinner Press
Feb 14, 2023
Kindle
272
Amazon
They say you shouldn’t meet trouble halfway, but Inspector Danny Quirke never has to worry about that. Trouble always finds him.
When a house fire rocks his small town of Kildevil Cove, Danny’s inquiries into the house’s mysterious inhabitants prompt the dispatch of Inspecteur Blaise Pascal from Quebec.
Pascal arrives in perpetual ill humor, but he’s an expert on this particular family. If anyone can determine whether this is a missing persons case or something more sinister, it’s Pascal.
Pity he doesn’t want to share.
Danny’s cop instincts say Pascal’s secrets are the key to solving this case. But before he can untangle that mystery, a local fishing trawler hauls up a dead body, and a murder victim is found eviscerated on his bed, a grisly message painted on the wall in his own blood. Are these deaths related to the house fire? Who is the message for? And can Danny find the culprit before they carry out the last act of their sinister plan?
Review by Xanthe
Reviewer for The Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
This is my first book from this series and the author. I’d say that Dark Vows can be read as a standalone but as you go through the story, there are clearly parts that talk about previous events that makes me interested in going back to the start and working my way through.
Things start with a literal bang and leaves more questions than answered when the mum and son aren’t discovered in the house. The dad is still around and as an electrician, is a prime suspect but cannot offer anything to the investigation. In comes Inspector Pascal and he’s both frustrating and necessary to possibly solving this case.
Dark Vows is quite an intricate story, with our main MC’s being Danny Quirke, Inspector on Kildevil Cove, and Blaise Pascal, an Inspector from Quebec, who is called in to assist due to his knowledge of the possible victims/suspects. I have to say, things got so much more so complicated than I was expecting with regards to the crimes, secrets and complex relationships that are revealed. You must pay attention as we go through the story with hints that are dropped, especially when we switch to several different characters POV. I was gripped with the plot of the crime from the start and then, as the story evolves with more information coming in, it gets twisted and dark.
There are a good team of people on Kildevil Cove that bring a lot to the police department. Each feel like they can be trusted to do their job but, when in one or two’s POV, there are possible hidden secrets that they don’t want others to know. It makes me intrigued to know if they will be getting their own story or if that would come about in a future book in the series. From the information given it’s clear that Danny has been through a lot to get to where he is today, settled with his husband and stepdaughter, but there is family history that is bothering him along with those painful knees that are causing him a lot of trouble. Blaise is a hard man but has been through so much, as his body will attest to. As a child, a man and a father, there’s a lot of pain that is slowly revealed through the book. The way he is written makes him quite a hard character to like, or even get to know as he seems to talk in riddles or not at all. By the end, I was very happy to see progress between him and Danny with what they investigate and go through.
The book is well written. A lot of detail is given in all the scenes that allows the reader to really visualize what has happened in the crime scenes and feel the tension between the inspectors, affection between husbands, and a psychopath and their obsession. The villain is excellently written, comes across as incredibly intelligent but also ever so slightly insane. I did find myself slightly confused a couple of times when characters were going somewhere in Quebec of Montreal. A lot of specific detail is given to the area and, having never been there, I had no idea where it was being referred to. I also found myself coming out of the story on occasion with the amount of french used. Of course, Pascal is from Quebec and speaks it as his main language as so will use it a fair amount but as it is something that I have very little knowledge of I found myself trying to work out what was being said or skipping the sentence entirely.
Overall, a well written crime mystery with very intriguing characters that keep you thinking and guessing throughout. It’s possible that it is better read in order, just because of the progression of the characters through the series but I still enjoyed reading it and had no trouble following what had happened in the previous books.