Susie Steiner
Police Procedural Fiction
Detective Manon Bradshaw Series
⭐️⭐️

I read Missing Presumed earlier this year and really enjoyed it. I genuinely like the characters and the dynamics of their lives, work and personal. Needless to say I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review the next book!!

I struggled. Struggled to stay interested, to finish, to find something like I found in Missing Presumed, but it never materialized . I was disappointed, the plot was no mystery and the continuous descriptions of Manon the whale exhausted me. I just wanted it to end to close the book on this non-thriller. The best chapters were the last three, I cared again.

Thank you always NetGalley for the opportunity to read for a fair review.

Thank you to Net Galley for an ARC of this title. I'd never had the chance to read Steiner, and I'm glad I did. It was a read that kept me reading into the night. When law enforcement has family that becomes suspect, how do you cope? How do you objectively move ahead? Very good book.

I love these books by Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed the first), the story kept me reading late into the night. Manon, the lead character was someone you like and care about her own story as much as finding out the why and who of the mystery

I was delighted to get the opportunity to read an advance copy of Persons Unknown as I had read and liked Missing, Presumed. I thought Persons Unknown was even better. Although it is considered a sequel, I found it was perfectly fine as a stand-alone novel. I couldn't put the book down; the characters and plot were unique and compelling. I found the realistic insights into a murder investigation from many perspectives interesting. I liked both the interracial adoption issues and single motherhood experience. I also appreciated the story line of the shopkeeper and her loneliness. This book was much more than a mystery/thriller, largely due to the great writing and interesting characters. I highly recommend it.

Great book! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

Oh my goodness what a rollercoaster ride. Poor Manon's return to her Cambridgeshire team turns into a nightmare when the professional turns personal. The intricacies of a team having to investigate the loved ones of one of their own are really laid bare here and at times I could barely read further. An excellent read and I look forward to the next installment already.

I received an ARC copy from the author and publisher via netgalley but I did have it on pre-order anyway after enjoying the first book earlier this year :)

Let’s switch gears from a book about politics to something mysterious and page turning! Persons Unknown by Susie Steiner looks like its going to be a great story. Can’t wait to dig in! For many years I loved suspense, thriller, and mystery novels and read them constantly. I got a little burnt out and eventually stopped reading them. But now I’m back to loving them!

Take a closer look….

Synopsis:

Detective Manon Bradshaw is five months pregnant and has officially given up on finding romantic love. Instead, she is in hot pursuit of work-life balance and parked in a cold case corridor—the price she’s had to pay for a transfer back to Cambridgeshire. This is fine, she tells herself. She can devote herself to bringing up her two children: her adopted twelve-year-old son, Fly Dent, and the new baby. Fly needed a fresh start—he was always being stopped and searched in London by officers who couldn’t see past the color of his skin. Manon feared that Fly, increasingly sullen and adolescent, was getting in with the wrong crowd at school, or that possibly he was the wrong crowd. Being home by five, for the sake of her children, is what Manon tells herself she needs.

Yet when a wealthy businessman is found stabbed close to police headquarters, Manon can’t help but sidle in on the briefing: The victim is a banker from London, worth millions. More dramatically, he was once in a relationship with Manon’s sister, Ellie, and is the father of Ellie’s toddler son.

The case begins to circle in on Manon’s home and her family. She finds herself pitted against the colleagues she once held dear: Davy Walker and Harriet Harper.

Can Manon separate what she knows about the people she loves from the suspicion hanging over them? Can she investigate the evidence, just as she would with any other case? With every fiber of her being, Manon must fight to find the truth.

I couldn't get into this; the writing style didn't work for me.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

DI Manon Bradshaw has returned to Cambridgeshire and is living with her sister Ellie, Ellie’s son Sol, and Manon’s adopted son Fly. Because she now has Fly, she is working cold cases to keep her hours manageable. The body of a man is found in a park and it turns out to be Ellie’s ex/Sol’s father. Then Fly is arrested for his murder.

I found the beginning a bit slow; I was enjoying the bits from Davy’s perspective, when actual police work was being done, but these were interspersed with Manon obsessing endlessly about her pregnancy and how tired/ungainly it made her feel and how she wished she weren’t shut out of the murder case. Once Manon started helping the defence lawyer, Mark, and doing investigating of her own, the pace picked up.

I found the plot interesting and coherent, with some excellent twists, although Ellie’s love life turned out to have been improbably exciting for the single mother of a toddler working as a nurse. I liked the Manon/Mark storyline, but there was something off for me about Manon’s relationships with Fly and her unborn baby. I can’t remember too much about the first novel in this series, but here Manon’s distress about Fly’s arrest and remand seemed out of all proportion to the way she related to him at the beginning of the book. As for the baby, she was either obsessing endlessly about it (see above) or wishing she had never got pregnant because of the effect on Fly, now the apple of her eye.

Recommended. I hope the next one has lots more of Davy.

In this second brilliant British crime novel featuring Detective Manon Bradshaw, Manon has been sidelined by her pregnancy. Wanting a safer job on the squad, she’s riding a desk, but that doesn’t keep her from getting involved in a high-profile murder. The local business man found stabbed to death turns out to be her sister’s former lover and the father of her young son. Manon is also feeling the strain of being a parent to adopted son Fly, who is getting into trouble at school and seems to be pulling further and further away from her every day. Trying to find a work -home life balance, and keep her own growing frustration under control seems an almost insurmountable task. Steiner’s books remind me of Tana French’s Murder squad books, they are long on character and plot development and short on gratuitous violence. Manon is the thinking person’s detective