Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆
Detective Inspector Stella Cole has her life turned upside down when her lawyer husband is killed in a hit-and-run accident, leaving her to bring up daughter Lola on her own, and struggling with an addiction to both booze and painkillers – anything to numb the pain of everyday existence. Though the driver in question is arrested, he receives a paltry sentence of only three years, and Stella begins to plot taking her own revenge. This is brought up short when the perpetrator is killed in prison, and evidence begins to accumulate that her husband’s death may not have been accidental.
The more DI Cole investigates, the murkier things get, as she discovers evidence of a vigilante group, Pro Patria Mori, operating at the highest levels. They’re not exactly happy to have Cole circling them, and decide she needs to be dealt with. However, Stella has been preparing to deliver the most brutal payback she can imagine, when she finds the man responsible, and is no longer a soft target, but prepared for whatever – and whoever – PPM might throw at her. Despite Britain’s strict gun-controls, her job helps her obtain access to everything she needs, before she sets off to the Highlands of Scotland to carry out her vengeance, with absolutely no regard for what the personal cost might be.
Looking back on this, what will stick in my mind is probably a fairly mind-blowing twist at about the one-third point, which quite upends everything I’d believed, and was something I definitely did not see coming. Well played, Mr. Maslen. Well played. I also liked the nicely-detailed way in which Stella obtained her weaponry. Not being au fait with the finer details of police firearms procedure, I can’t comment on its practicality; however, it sounds like it could work, and that’s good enough for me. The action is fairly low-key for the most part, though ends in a rousing finale, with Stella’s assault on her target, who knows she’s coming and has made defensive preparations. Just not nearly enough of them.
There were some other plot aspects that didn’t convince. In the end, the person directly responsible for her husband’s death – as in, actually driving the car – is one of PPM’s top officials, which doesn’t seem to make sense. It’d be more logical to use the person who was actually sent to jail, and they clearly have no issues with throwing low-lives at problems, or access to the same. Similarly, it’d be more logical to have had her work up the chain of command. It still makes for a satisfying and vigorous tale of justice emphatically served, though I’m not certain how there can be six more books in the series. It feels as if Cole has burned an awful lot of bridges, with a return to her job seeming highly problematic. It’s certainly not a light read, yet perhaps is the better for unashamedly embracing the darkness in its topic and heroine.
Author: Andy Maslen
Publisher: Tyton Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 7 in the DI Stella Cole Thrillers series.