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You are here: Home > Fiction > Crime, Mystery & Thriller > Bitter Blue

Author: Cath Staincliffe

Genre: Crime, Mystery & Thriller
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780749081713
Pages: 288
Rights: World Eng and US Dist
Pub. Date: 25th June 2007

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Price: £6.99

Format: Paperback

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On her first day back after the Easter break Manchester based PI Sal Kilkenny takes on two new cases.  The first is to discover who is sending offensive poison pen letters to hotel receptionist Lucy Barker.  The second is surveillance work for a couple who want reassurance that there are no nuisance neighbours or criminal activity in the area they're planning to buy a new home.

As Sal prepares to stake out the streets a bitter cold snap plunges the country into arctic conditions.  Her stress levels are not helped by the escalation of the campaign against Lucy Barker and her inability to nail the perpetrator who maddeningly avoids capture.  Plus there's trouble at home as Sal's daughter Maddie seems unable to settle at school.  When Sal's normally mundane surveillance duties bring her face to face with a grim discovery and violent crime she's sure that it just can't get any worse before it gets better.  Unluckily for Sal there is more than one surprise in store for her and a nightmarish sequence of events may well turn out to be a matter of life and death...

‘Well paced...the disparate elements of the story are carefully resolved, and Sal’s self doubts at the end of the book are credible and poignant.’Deadly Pleasures

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'Manchester sleuth and single parent Sal Kilkenny and her seven-year-old daughter Maddie share a house with single father Ray and his son Tom. She's a working woman who struggles to balance the pressures and problems of private and professional life.
Problems such as Maddie's sudden reluctance to go to school and the fact that she's unwilling to talk about it and that she's misbehaving in ways she never would have before.
Problems such as the case of Lucy Barker, a young woman who works at a Salford hotel and has been receiving poison pen letters threatening her death.
Problems such as the case she is working for a middle-aged couple who are buying a house in an expensive area. They want the neighborhood checked out and while doing that Sal has to stake out the street in the nighttime cold.
There seems to be very little to go on as far as the second problem is concerned, because Lucy has few friends, her parents live in Australia and her fiancé had been killed in auto accident from which she barely escaped with her life. The third problem has Sal out in the artic-like cold investigating the people who live in a derelet house and also a pair of lesbians, one of which is abusing the other. And then there is always the problem of her daughter in the back of her mind.
As the problems escalate Sal is pulled in three different directions, pulling the reader right along with her. Ms. Staincliffe knows how to jump from one plotline to another without losing her reader's interest. She knows how to use the treat of violence to keep the suspense flowing and she knows how to make you like her heroine, even though said heroine can sometimes be as infuriating as all heck. But as infuriating as Sal sometimes gets, she's a great character and I really liked this book.'Lenore Logan

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