Lies to Tell by Marion Todd
Publisher: Canelo, UK
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Rating: 3 stars
Reviewed by Fern

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer…

Early one morning DI Clare Mackay receives a message from her boss DCI Alastair Gibson telling her to meet him in secret. She does as he asks and is taken from St Andrews to a secure location in the remote Scottish hills. There, she is introduced to ethical hacker Gayle Crichton and told about a critical security breach coming from inside Police Scotland. Clare is sworn to secrecy and must conceal Gayle’s identity from colleagues until the source is found.

Clare already has her hands full keeping a key witness under protection and investigating the murder of a university student. When a friend of the victim is found preparing to jump off the Tay Road Bridge it is clear he is terrified of someone. But who? Clare realises too late that she has trusted the wrong person. As her misplaced faith proves a danger to herself and others, Clare must fight tooth and nail to protect those she cares about and see justice done.

DI Clare Mackay is all settled in St. Andrews and feeling good about how things are going. When she’s instructed that her morning meeting has been cancelled and she needs to meet her boss in secret things become weird fast. DCI Gibson and Clare are taken to an underground bunker in the remote Scottish hills and threatened with having their Warrants taken if they breathe a word of what’s discussed in those walls. Clare trusts her team implicitly, but with the threat of her entire career hanging on the line she’s going to have to get used to subterfuge very quickly. Will it all be a deadly mistake?

I’ve been enjoying this series and this book was no different. I was pleased that Clare is feeling settled and happy in her life and strongly feel this book can be read as a stand alone. The relationships and much of the history between the characters and Clare’s team is very well explained and I don’t feel readers will miss anything if they start fresh with this book.

I found this to be very much a police procedural style of novel and set in Scotland but not in Edinburgh or Glasgow I thought it had a good blend of a more rural feel while still being a university city based police story. I also was really impressed there were two or three main plotlines all twining together and this helped keep the pace of the story feeling like it was moving along and not dragging in any areas. I was pretty impressed I managed to guess one of the main plot endings – but was rather surprised with a few others and so this also felt very balanced and enjoyable to me.

I must admit Clare’s love life is getting a little more complicated and the ending left a few big questions hovering in the air. This is a love-life question – not a plot being left unresolved – but readers who dislike any real romance might find this book strays a little too far for their liking. And while the police/mystery aspects to the story are all very neatly tied up some of Clare’s personal life is definitely left unresolved so these might be issues for some readers.

With interesting characters and a very strong plot with complications and a few different aspects to it this was a complex and well written police procedural that I greatly enjoyed.