The Family Business
I’ve had to do this Friday Read well in advance as this week I’ll be up around the location where the latest novel from Hania Allen is set: the wonderful Tayside area around Dundee. This is Hania’s third novel featuring Polish detective Dania Gorska, and although the action starts outside the city (it’s hard to bury a body in the centre of a Victorian industrial town) it very quickly moves into Dundee itself, where Dania is investigating a family whose business is taxidermy – a spooky profession in itself, before the body count even starts to rise.
In fact the Affleck family is no stranger to missing persons – the father who heads the business spends much of his free time digging around the fields and woods near his estate where may years ago his son disappeared and was never found. So when Dania reopens this cold case and starts digging into the past, she soon realises that the Affleck family are hiding more than they let on . . . and that there are some dark secrets that everyone wants to stay buried . . .
Hania is so good at getting into the wynds and closes of Dundee, and with her latest, she shows herself to be equally at home in the countryside and villages outside the town. Just where I will be spending my summer holiday, in fact! But in not so murderous a fashion, I hope . . .
Krystyna Green
The third gripping novel in the Polish detective series featuring DI Dania Gorska.
In the north of Dundee, DI Dania Gorska is leading the search for a missing girl, with the police and volunteers combing the dramatic landscape in hope of finding the child. What they discover in a derelict hut in the hills isn't the girl, but is the remains of a body, chained to a wall.
This body isn't the missing child but is identified as another young boy, Cameron Affleck, who disappeared many years before in a case that could never be solved. Dania contacts the boy's father, who still spends much time digging around the fields where his son was last seen, in hope of finding his body.
Dania begins to unearth the old case, determined to discover Cameron's killer and looking for possible connections to the present-day missing child. But as she digs into the past, she realises that the Affleck family are hiding more than they let on and that there are some dark secrets that everyone wants to stay buried...
Praise for Hania Allen
'Nicely nasty in all the right places . . . The story rattles along until bringing the curtain down with an unnerving twist' Craig Robertson
'A fresh new find for crime fans ... the plot is intriguing, the characters are well drawn, and the end comes with an unnerving twist. Extremely readable' Sunday Post
'Captivating characters and an intriguing plot. A great new find for crime fans' Lin Anderson
'Pitch-perfect . . . a witty, tense crime novel written in a highly readable style' Russel D McLean
