Book Review: Dead Memories by Angela Marsons

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Can you believe we're on to the tenth Kim Stone thriller? I can't. It's been a rollercoaster, with Kim facing many challenges over the years, but perhaps in Dead Memories she is about to face her most challenging one yet ... Facing up to and sharing her past.

Dead Memories is, both poignant and liberating. For DI Kim Stone a truly horrific killer dredging up her most traumatic memories in the form of crime scenes refecting incidents in Kim's past, is not only extremely personal, but torturous. 

One of the things I loved most about Dead Memories was the fact that it gives the reader such insight into Kim's character. We'd always known she had a traumatic past, but having the details fleshed out like this, allows us even more insight into her character. The fact that, at first, she is reluctant to share these intimate details with her team made my heart ache for her and prompted a truly visceral hatred for the killer. Her fierce independance, her reluctance to show weakness, her desire to keep her emotions locked up are what makes her the strong, character we all know and love. However, she chooses ultimately to reveal her past to her team and, in my opinion, rather than leaving her vulnerable, it makes her stronger. 
For me, Dead Memories symbolises a pivotal moment in the development of Kim Stone as a character and , when I finished reading, I was excited to find out what Angela Marsons will do with Kim next. I feel Dead Memories signifies a subtle change in trajectory for Kim and that is why Marsons is such a successful series writer. 

She keeps her characters fresh, re-introducing past characters and allowing them to grow, consolidating existing ones and allowing them to shine ... and it's all done in such a seeminlgy effortless way. 
Her plotlines are tight, her action scenes breathtaking (OMG that last action scene - still in awe of it) and her characerisation is nuanced. 

I came away from Dead Memoires feeling like I knew the characters better ... that's some achievemnet in a tenth book. Hat's off - this was a cracking read!


Blurb

She ruined their lives. Now they’re going to destroy hers.

‘Someone is recreating every traumatic point in your life. They are doing this to make you suffer, to make you hurt and the only possible end game can be death. Your death.’

On the fourth floor of Chaucer House, two teenagers are found chained to a radiator. The boy is dead but the girl is alive. For Detective Kim Stone every detail of the scene mirrors her own terrifying experience with her brother Mikey, when they lived in the same tower block thirty years ago.

When the bodies of a middle-aged couple are discovered in a burnt-out car, Kim can’t ignore the chilling similarity to the death of Erica and Keith – the only loving parents Kim had ever known. 

Faced with a killer who is recreating traumatic events from her past, Kim must face the brutal truth that someone wants to hurt her in the worst way possible. Desperate to stay on the case, she is forced to work with profiler Alison Lowe who has been called in to observe and monitor Kim’s behaviour.

Kim has spent years catching dangerous criminals and protecting the innocent. But with a killer firmly fixed on destroying Kim, can she solve this complex case and save her own life or will she become the final victim?