Review: The Forgotten Victim (DCI Rachel King #4) by Helen H. Durrant

                                                          

Print Length: 238 pages

Publisher: Joffe Books (December 29, 2020)

From Goodreads.com: The decomposed remains of a body are found entombed in the depths of a disused Manchester cotton mill. Detective Rachel King is called in to investigate the grisly discovery.

IF NO ONE KNOWS THE VICTIM, HOW CAN YOU CATCH THE KILLER?

With gunshot wounds to the knees, this was no accident. This was murder. But the question is: was this a gangland killing or a murder motivated by a deadly secret closer to home?

With the help of DS Elwyn Price, Rachel must follow the evidence where it takes her. But who can she trust? And who in this notorious area knows more than they’re admitting to?

Meanwhile, Rachel has a huge secret of her own. How long can she keep her pregnancy from her colleagues before she has to face up to the reality of her relationship with the shadowy character Jed McAteer?

Can Rachel uncover the dark secrets of the past and catch the killer — before anyone else dies?

  

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My Rating: 2 Stars out of 5

I have been a fan of this series for awhile now (and a fan of this author for even longer),  but holy heck was this one a disappointment. It didn't even read like it had been written by the same author as the prior novels. 

To begin with Rachel is nothing like the character we met three books ago. In this novel she finds out she is pregnant, and we spent the first half of the book with her either refusing to think about it at all, or debating on whether or not she is even going to go through with the pregnancy. Then about half-way through it is like a flip is switched and all of the sudden she is all about the baby. The same applies to her ex-boyfriend Jed. First, she is madder than a wet cat at the fact that her ex-husband has decided to sell his attached cottage to the man, and the next thing you know, she's letting him move into her house while the paperwork is finalized and potentially knocking down some diving walls to make the two cottages one large one. Huh? I felt like I was getting whiplash just from Rachel's actions alone. 

She also wasn't the sharp-minded detective before either. And while she kept using the excuse of "baby brain", it got old quick. Especially when Jed is practically spelling it out to her that he was the buyer of her ex-husband's cottage and she still wasn't getting it.  This "baby brain" also bled over into her abilities as a detective, missing things that seemed very obvious to me as a reader (and to other members of her team it would seem). A very disappointing turn of events for her character to be sure. 

And then there was the plot. Which at first seemed interesting enough. Two lads accidentally discover a body that had been bricked up in a tunnel that it would seem no one knew about. That he had been murdered approximately three years ago added another later, how could Rachel and her team possibly figure this one out. And of course good old Keaton has returned, only this time he is a supervisor and an even bigger pain in the butt than he had been in the prior novel (something I didn't think was possible). 

However, the longer the plot goes on, the more it just..... stagnates. We are repeatedly told the same information, each time the investigating team treating it like it's something new or surprising. We have a selection of dubious characters all obviously hiding something, and an utterly ridiculous side-plot of some random young man seeking Rachel out on the street and telling her that her parents car accident wasn't actually an accident. Throw a police officer from another precinct in the mix, who apparently knows all about this young man (and somehow knows exactly when he's spoken to her), but will say nothing more other than he's running a scam. A scam of what, we never do find out as this particular plot line goes absolutely nowhere. It makes me wonder if this plot point will somehow be used to drive the next book forward as when this one ends, Rachel is preparing to go out on extended maternity leave. 

Overall, while this was a very disappointing installment of the series, I see that there are two other books left in the series, and at this point I might as well read them as well. I just hope they are an improvement over this one.