Bleeding Heart Yard (Book Review)

  

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths (2023)
(Read on Kindle)

This book can without problem be read as a standalone crime novel (and seems to be marketed as such) but it is actually also the third in a series involving detective Harbinder Kaur (Sikh, lesbian and single).

Harbinder has recently moved to London and is now a Detective Inspector. (In the previous two books she was a Detective Sergeant). A man is found dead at a school reunion which was also attended by one of Harbinder's members of staff, Cassie. It looks like the man died of a drug overdose, but a murder investigation has to be carried out, and as he was a controversal MP, various motives must be considered. As Cassie and the victim used to belong to the same group at school, she is suspended from taking part in this case - but of course in her own mind keeps thinking about it anyway.

The perspective from which the story is told varies from chapter to chapter between Harbinder, Cassie and another of Cassie's old schoolmates. From the very first sentence in the book, the reader learns that Cassie is struggling with the question "Is it possible to forget that you've committed a murder?" As things progress, it also becomes clear that the murder at the school reunion may be connected to another death in the past, which involved the group of friends that Cassie used to hang out with. That time it was a young male fellow student who died falling off a Tube platform. It was not classified as a murder, but was put down to the guy being high on drugs. But Cassie and her group of friends knew that it probably was murder - because they had planned it...

I'm not 100% convinced that the changing perspectives is the best way to tell the story; but at the same time it does challenge the reader to consider the scenario from different angles - including how well we really do remember events (and our own thoughts about them) from the past. Is it really the actual events that we recall, many years later - or our own "stories"?

In spite of more than one character in this book being convinced that they know the truth, the story still mangages to take some unexpected twists and turns along the way before all is revealed at the end. 

- - - 

ELLY GRIFFITHS is also the author of the Ruth Galloway series which has been my favourite crime series over a number of years (I think I've probably reviewed most of the titles on this blog).