Another excellent book in the Lottie Parker series.

This is a good example of what a solid police procedural should be. There are lots of twists and turns in this book, and some shocks for Lottie on a personal level as well. Just when I got my head around the latest twist and thought I knew who the murderer was, it was proven to be wrong!

That is what makes me continue reading this series. And after what Boyd told Lottie, clearly I need to know what happens next, because I am nosy that way :)

4.5 stars from me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture.

A woman is found dead dressed in a wedding dress. Lottie has doubts that this is suicide & when another girl is found dead in a wedding dress it looks like she was right. When a child goes missing & another suicide is found to be murder Lottie & the team are kept on their toes. As Lottie attempts to unravel the clues she also has the mysterious behaviour of Boyd to contend with.

I have loved the Lottie Parker series from the start, although around book 5 I was beginning to feel that it was a stretch to believe that so much involved her family. However, even though things aren't great for her at least there's not so much family involvement! As always I am left eagerly awaiting the next one in the series!

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book.

Absolutely loved this book! PG has done it again! You don’t have to read the series in order but if your just starting it’s the best way to read them, all the main character stories carry on through each book, I love this, keeping up with their stories. Thank you for letting me review this title. I cannot wait for the next instalment

Now that we are at book seven of this amazing series, I feel as though Detective Lottie Parker and her team are family. This means I am 100% behind the team as I am reading. They all have their flaws, but this is what makes them human, and fascinating characters to get to know. I always have faith that they will get to the bottom of what has happened.

In Broken Souls, the reader must be patient. The novel is set, as always, in the fictional town of Ragmullin and the surrounding villages. As the village is so small, it soon becomes clear that most residents have some kind of connection to each other, which leaves Lottie and her team with a lot of suspects to chase and a very tangled web of mystery! Naturally, there were some characters of whom I was suspicious, but I had no real idea of who could have committed such awful crimes. The uncertainty definitely leads to a huge amount of tension and I was desperate to find out the truth.

There are some sections of Broken Souls that are written from the perspective of the killer, both in the past and present day. These are incredibly intriguing and I spent a lot of time trying to work out how these scenes fit into the overall picture of the investigation.

#7 in the DI Lottie Parker series by Patricia Gibney, but can easily be read as a stand-alone. (But you are missing out on a great series!)

A woman’s body is found, hanged. She was wearing a wedding dress….but when a second woman’s body is found, after a ‘fall’ from a care home roof, also in a wedding dress the police realise something sinister is going on.

DI Lottie Parker, her home life is the usual chaos, with her three children, an interfering mother and a half brother all in the mix. There’s also her relationship with her colleague Boyd, he’s asked her to marry him and she’s agreed but wants to keep it quiet for now…..

The story felt a little disjointed to me at the beginning, with seemingly unrelated chapters, but I was so wrong. As the tale progresses the darker it gets, with the murders, a missing child and creepy doll maker and the story all comes together in a marvellously twisty plot.

Lottie is her usual, dogged, determined but also insecure self, putting herself in danger with only others welfare in her mind.

Can she find Lily? And can she stop the killer before any more deaths? Oh and the bombshell at the end left me speechless!!! Brilliant and I can’t wait for Book 8.

Thank you to Bookouture, the author and NetGalley for a free copy of the ebook. This is my honest, unbiased review.

Poor Lottie Parker can’t catch a break, can she! I’m genuinely surprised that, seeing as we are on book seven in the series, Lottie Parker isn’t spending her time rocking backwards and forwards in the corner! One person can only handle so much! As selfish as this sounds, I’m glad that she is having a lot of rubbish dumped on her because it means that we will get more books! Of course I don’t wish her harm, I just don’t want this series to end.

Like most psychological thrillers, ‘Broken Souls’ spends a lot of time creeping around building a picture, and setting the scene. This isn’t a storyline that can be rushed, simply because the author incorporates a lot of complexities around her characters, and that in turn, means that the tension needs to be built slowly to enable the realism to fly. If you’re anything like me and want to get to the crux of a storyline pronto, a slow starting novel can be quite frustrating. Thankfully, Patricia Gibney knows her craft and her readers, and makes the wait certainly worthwhile.

If you haven’t picked up a Lottie Parker novel yet, where have you been?! Don’t worry if you’re wanting to read ‘Broken Souls’ first as each book is fine to read as a standalone. However, if you like to follow characters journeys in order, then I highly suggest you start at book one so that you can make sense of Lottie’s personal timeline and why she is the way she is.

I really enjoyed this book! There was a lot of guessing who was in the firing line and, even though I did work it out before it was written in black and white, it didn’t stop me from enjoying it at all. You never know with Patricia Gibney, which way her books are going to head, and I have to say that the tension of this instalment was severely chilling and very realistic. I also thought it was great to see yet another side to Lottie, even if she doesnt exactly do herself many favours with the way she projects herself at times. I mean, shes a brilliant, brilliant character, but I will admit to wanting to grab her shoulders and shake her, just to make her see sense!!

Now, ‘Broken Souls’ ended in a way that irked me and excited me in equal measures. It irked me because of the mini cliffhanger, yet it excited me because I am so eager to find out what happens next! I dislike the waiting though, but I just know that it will be worth it!

Patricia Gibney is one of my go to authors, one that never fails to put goosebumps on my arms and a chill in the air. ‘Broken Souls’ is an addictive, brilliantly written addition to the Lottie Parker series – I loved it!

When the body of a woman is found hanging in her home, wearing a wedding dress, it is initially thought that it is a case of suicide. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when a second woman is found dead, also wearing a wedding dress. This is too much of a coincidence for D I Lottie Parker, who immediately starts to look for evidence of foul play. When it is revealed that one of the women had a young daughter who has seemingly gone missing, it becomes a race against time to catch the perpetrator before more bodies are discovered.

It is hard to believe that Broken Souls is the seventh book in the Lottie Parker series, the first book, The Missing Ones, only being published in 2017. In this short time, we have seen Lottie grow as a character, dealing with the grief of her lost husband and now contemplating marriage to one of her colleagues. Her family is as dysfunctional as ever, with the added bonus of her half-brother, Leo, disrupting the equilibrium even further! After events in previous books, I was pleased to see Lottie’s family taking more of a back seat in this one – there is only so much trauma one family can take!

With there being two deaths near the beginning of the book, and a lot of characters introduced, I initially struggled to remember who everybody was. As the book progressed, however, and the cases began to intertwine, I developed more of an understanding of each character and how they were connected to the dead women. The setting, a place where everyone seemed to know everybody else, helped to muddy the waters when trying to find the culprit as there were so many shifty characters! A few hints were dropped throughout the book, but I did not predict the outcome at all.

As this is now the seventh book, I feel that I have come to know the characters really well and so I was left reeling at the revelation at the end of this installment. There is a genuine, ‘”Noooo!” moment in the final pages, and I really hope that Patricia Gibney resolves this issue in a pleasing way! To find out what it is, you will just have to read the book!

If you have never read the Lottie Parker series, then I cannot recommend it enough. With great plots and characters, Broken Souls is a great addition to an already brilliant set of books.

A nail-biting and breath-taking crime thriller that will make the hairs on your neck stand on end, Patricia Gibney’s Broken Souls is a heart-stopping and jaw-dropping chiller that once you start reading, you simply will not be able to put down.

Bride-to-be Cara Dunne should be at the top of the world. She is about to marry the love of her life and has a long and happy future ahead of her. However, when she is found hanging in her wedding dress in her home with a lock of her hair removed, her happiness is cruelly cut short. Detective Lottie Parker is the first on the scene. Lottie cannot help but ask herself who could possibly have been evil enough and cruel enough to murder a young woman in the prime of her life. Who could have hated her so much? And why was a lock of Cara’s hair removed? When the body of another young woman Fiona, whose wedding was just around the corner, is pushed off a hospital roof in a wedding dress with a lock of her hair cut off, Lottie is convinced that the two murders are linked and that the killer is not a random stranger with a thirst for murder, but somebody known to the two victims.

Breaking the news to the family of a murder victim is always a difficult task, but Lottie is shocked when she discovers that Fiona’s eight year old daughter Lily did not return home from her dance recital that afternoon. A discovery that chills Lottie to the bone, the detective is convinced that the killer will not rest until the next victim is claimed – and the next victim is surely going to be Lily. Determined to rescue the orphaned child from the most horrific of fates, Lottie takes the case in her own hands for the most dangerous case of her career.

A vicious killer will do anything to claim his next victim and they will not let anybody or anything stand in their way – not even a determined detective like Lottie Parker.

Broken Souls is crime fiction par excellence. Patricia Gibney is a true virtuoso of the genre and she has penned a dark, gripping and disturbing read that keeps readers gripped throughout and up way past their bedtime. A scary, chilling and captivating page-turner featuring a fabulous detective and more twists and turns than a rollercoaster, Broken Souls is an intelligent and unforgettable thriller fans of the genre will not want to miss.

Progress--Finally!

Multiple suicides have the small Irish town of Ragmullin on edge. When Detective Lottie Parker examines one of the crime scenes, she begins to suspect that there is more going on than meets the eye. As she and her team dig deeper into the the suicide victims' pasts, they uncover a dark web of lies and twisted minds.

Lottie Parker is back and better than ever. Sure she’s investigating horrible murders, her kids constantly remind her that she is never there when they need her, and her romantic life has hit a snag (Boyd is keeping a secret), but for once she is attempting to deal with her issues vs. drowning herself in booze and pills. I appreciated this much-I needed this change in her behavior!

The mystery was interesting and had me turning the pages. However, I thought there were too many characters and POV’s to keep track of. I also wasn’t happy with one certain development, but we shall see how things play out in the next book.

Broken Souls is book 7 in the Lottie Parker Detective series. After finishing book 6, I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep up with this series due to the lack of character development. However, I have to say that this book reignited my love for this series and I am looking forward to book 8!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I received a copy of this in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

While Broken Souls is the 7th book in the series, it can definitely be read as a stand-alone. the autho ris great at including enough background information that it makes that possible.

The characters are certainly well-developed and easy to like. The storyline is unique and easy to follow.

Definitely check out more by this author.

I have been a fan of Patricia’s work for a little while now. I had the good fortune to discover how great the Lottie Parker series is fairly early on. Since then I have read and loved every new book that Patricia releases. I read the synopsis for ‘Broken Souls’ and it certainly sounded like one hell of a read. I was fortunate enough to be able to have a sneaky peak at an early review copy and having just finished ‘Broken Souls’, all I can say is ‘bloody hell’. ‘Broken Souls’ is another fantastic addition to the Lottie Parker series. I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Broken Souls’ but more about that in a bit.
What can I say about Lottie Parker? She is one of my heroines and one of my most favourite fictional characters ever!! She is a woman of a particular age, who has been through the mill a fair bit. She was married but her husband sadly died. They did have a family together and Lottie lives with them in the same house. Lottie is a dedicated mother and grandmother but she is also a dedicated police officer. Sometimes her work life has intruded into her personal life and vice versa. I could understand why she often feels conflicted and why her loved ones occasionally feel as though she cares more about her work than about them. Lottie is lovely, she is kind, compassionate and sensitive. She can also be rather stubborn and headstrong. That said Lottie is determined to achieve justice for the victims of crime and see the guilty party pay for what they have done. The crimes in this book see Lottie having to investigate and solve the most challenging crimes of her career to date. Will Lottie and her team solve this puzzling set of crimes? Well for the answers to those questions and more you are just going to have to read the book for yourselves to find out as I am not going to tell you.
Oh my blooming Aunty Nora, ‘Broken Souls’ is one hell of a fantastic read that really is an unputdownable page turner of a book. Once I picked it up and started to read, I just couldn’t put the book down. The book wasn’t exactly glued to my hand but it might as well have been because it travelled everywhere with me. I was drawn into this book and into the investigation from the first word on the first page and I became so wrapped up in the story and the investigation that I lost all track of time. Usually I have the attention span of a gnat and I am easily distracted but not in this case. The story had captured my imagination and I knew that I had to concentrate hard to keep pace with the story, keep tabs on the investigation so I didn’t miss any clues and to find out if Lottie managed to find a bit of peace in her personal life. Whilst I was reading ‘Broken Souls’ I was able to shut out all distractions and keep my focus solely on the book. In fact the world outside could have ended and I would have known nothing about it.
‘Broken Souls’ is brilliantly written but then I wouldn’t expect anything else from the brilliantly talented Patricia Gibney. She certainly knows how to start a story with a bang and in such a way that you won’t be able to forget it very easily. Once Patricia has your attention she will not let it go for the duration of the story. The author uses such powerful and realistic descriptions that I felt as though I was part of the story myself. In fact if I could have jumped inside the pages of this book to join Lottie’s team then I would have done. ‘Broken Souls’ was one of those books that had me gripped throughout and on the edge of my seat through most of the book.
In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Broken Souls’. It’s safe to say that Patricia Gibney has another bestselling hit on her hands and it is sure to soar to the top of the bestsellers list. I would definitely recommend this author and every single one of her books to other readers. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.

After multiple suicides, Lottie takes a deeper look - and discovers they were murdered. Lottie struggles to uncover the identity of the killer while her fiance, Boyd, continues to withdraw into himself. Combined with her chaotic relationships with her children, Lottie struggles to keep it all together.

Broken Souls by Patricia Gibney is another winner in this series. This is the 7th book in the series and I have read all but one and it can easily be read as a stand-alone because the author always gives enough background to make this possible.
This time DI Lottie Parker and her team investigates an apparent suicide of a woman wearing her wedding dress only to find that another woman also wearing a wedding dress has died after a fall from the roof of the hospital in which she worked. Soon both deaths are treated as murders.
The case takes another turn when it’s discovered that the second woman has a child who has disappeared after dance class on the day her mother died.
Not only is DI Parker going through a rough patch at work but her home life is also in turmoil with her kids acting out and her love life has taken an unexpected hit which is revealed at the end of the book.
Patricia Gibney never disappoints and this is no exception. I will faithfully read all her books as long as she keeps knocking out winners like this.
Thanks to Bookouture/NetGalley for letting me read this advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

It might seem strange to you, but I prefer the books I read to have about 300-350 pages. Don't ask me why, because I cannot give you an answer.

But there are certain storytellers that are so skilled, that I don't care about the number of pages. Even if there were 1000 I would read them anyway. 

This author is one of those magicians. She juggles words like there is no tomorrow and they all fall into place to create a work of art.

There are a lot of characters in this book, but I did not mind that. It made the story more complex to give my brain an extra workout.

Of course we could count on DI Parker and her team to work everything out and put the baddies behind bars thus achieving good results. Her private life seems a lot more in turmoil.

Then there is only left to say that I loved it and the countdown to the next part is on. 

5 stars.

Thank you, Patricia Gibney and Bookouture (via Netgalley)

This has to be the toughest case for Lottie Parker and her team yet. There is no real connection between the victims, it’s not even sure if it murder or suicide. And nobody knows how the missing little girl fits in to what’s going on. Hooked from the first chapter, I couldn’t put the book down. I had no idea as to why things happened and who might be involved. And maybe, just maybe, we might get rid of ACTING Superintendent. That really would make my day. There is so much going on in the personal life of Lottie Parker that I can’t wait for the next book.

🔍So many secrets and a little girl to save: 📖 pageturner for me😲
4.5🌟stars
😍👍👍This was my first time reading a Patricia Gibney novel and I must say, what a compelling story! The murder investigations and search for a missing child by Irish garda DI Lottie Parker and her team had driving urgency, lots of red herrings and SO many secrets to uncover in this rural community that it kept me totally invested in the story. And the mysterious attitude of Lottie's fellow detective and love interest Boyd kept me waiting for the shoe to drop right through to the end. 😲

🔎The opening chapters, all seemingly disconnected, soon resolved into a complex series of macabre deaths suspiciously alike in their staging and all linked by a single common strand.

😊 I am ready for the next in the series and will be going back to the earlier stories because Gibney tells a fascinating tale and I want to learn more about Lottie, Boyd, Kirby and Lottie's family.

Thanks to publisher Bookouture and NetGalley for providing a complimentary advance copy of the book; this is my voluntary and honest review.

I love this series and it was great to catch up with Lottie and Boyd again.
The story starts off fast paced and with the discovery of a woman who looks to have hanged herself, so Lottie and the team are kept busy.
Soon another death occurs and this time the woman has fallen to her death.
Both women were in wedding dresses, so Lottie has to work out the connection. On top of this, one of the women’s daughters has gone missing so the pressure is on.
There were quite a lot of characters to keep up with in this book and I found myself having to think about who was who throughout the book. Whilst I understand there needs to be different people involved, the amount of characters and all the links had me a bit confused.
I can’t wait to read the next book though, especially with that ending...
Thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Broken Souls is the seventh book in the Detective Inspector Lottie Parker police procedural series, and it's a welcome return to form for both Ms Gibnry and Lottie as the last few novels had slipped in terms of her character getting on peoples last nerve but here she is shown in a better light.

Both Cara Dunne and Fiona Heffernan look to have committed suicide and were both residents of the sleepy village of Ragmullin; Cara by hanging and Fiona by jumping from the roof of her workplace. But their location isn't the only thing they have in common: they were also both dressed in wedding garb. This is bad enough but a short time later Lottie and colleagues realise that Fiona's eight-year-old daughter Lily is missing after taking part in show rehearsals at her dance school. So are the confirmed murders connected and if so how? And is Lily's abduction the handiwork of the same perpetrator or an opportunistic endeavour on the part of the kidnapper?

There is enough mystery, murder and drama here to satisfy any crime reader and the twists and turns were rather shocking and, as they should be, unexpected. The author makes the possible suspects blend into the crowd so it is certainly no easy feat to spot the culprits; Gibney partakes in some captivating misdirection and plants red herrings in plain sight for us to query. It is a dark, complex and thoroughly entertaining read which had no problem keeping my attention. I have read each book in the series and after careful consideration believe it's the most compelling so far. A cracking page-turner. I hope the next instalment is as accomplished. Many thanks to Bookouture for an ARC.

This is book seven in the Lottie Parker series . Lottie and her team investigate the deaths of two women dressed in wedding gowns . Was it murder or suicide ? Another chilling and disturbing Lottie Parker thriller that you won't soon forget ! An absolute must read written by an amazing author !! Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for the opportunity to read and review this book !
#Netgalley #Bookouture #BrokenSouls

Seventh book featuring DI Lottie Parker but first of mine, this was again a different police procedural.

A series of suicides suddenly seemed off when the pathologist realized that it was all building up to be murder. DI Lottie Parker and her team investigated. A lot of convoluted clues with no interpretation and a missing child too added to the confusion.

Patricia Gibney wrote a detailed investigation depicting realities of working with different members of a team. Lottie was a straight-shooter too involved in her work, I felt bad for her children. She worked hard but had her down points and vulnerabilities. This book was a mix of reality and fiction. She had slackers in her team, her boss and kids were losing patience, and her partner was moving away emotionally.

The investigation was long and frustrating, And the final reveal was unexpected. But it was the storm in Lottie's life (the doc in me totally guessed it) which turned the story. I wonder want would happen in the next book.