Review: The Bitter Season by Tami Hoag (audio)

Title:The Bitter Season

Author:Tami Hoag

Series:Kovac & Liska, #5

Narrator:David Colacci

Published:January 2016, Brilliance Audio

Length:13 hours 47 minutes

Source:Publisher

EVERY FAMILY HAS A SECRET. THEIRS WILL CHILL YOU TO THE CORE.

#1  New York Times
Bestselling author Tami Hoag returns to the bestselling series of her
career with a Kovac and Liska case that will delight fans and new
readers alike.

A murder from the past. A murder from the present.
And a life that was never meant to be… As the dreary, bitter weather
of late fall descends on Minneapolis, Detective Nikki Liska is restless.
After moving to the cold case squad in order to spend more time with
her sons, she misses the rush of pulling an all-nighter, the sense of
urgency of hunting a murderer on the loose. Most of all she misses her
old partner, Sam Kovac.

Sam is having an even harder time
adjusting to Nikki’s absence, saddled with a green new partner younger
than pieces of Sam’s wardrobe. Sam is distracted from his troubles by an
especially brutal double homicide: a middle-aged husband and wife
bludgeoned and hacked to death in their home with a ceremonial Japanese
samurai sword. Nikki’s case, the unsolved murder of a family man,
community leader, and decorated sex crimes detective for the Minneapolis
PD, is less of a distraction: Twenty years later, there is little hope
for finding the killer who got away.

On the other end of the
spectrum, Minneapolis resident Evi Burke has a life she only dreamed of
as a kid in and out of foster homes: a beautiful home, a family, people
who love her, a fulfilling job. Little does she know that a danger from
her past is stalking her perfect present. A danger powerful enough to
pull in both Kovac and Liska and destroy the perfect life she was never
meant to have.

My thoughts:This is the latest book in Tami Hoag’s Kovac and Liska series and I really like this series. Tami Hoag is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors and I jumped at the opportunity to read and review this latest one.

I love Kovac and Liska and love how they work together. Even though they are no longer partners – Liska has moved to the cold case department in order to have more regular hours and be able to spend more time with her sons – they end up working their respective cases side-by-side. That is, until it seems that these two unrelated cases just might be related after all.

What I love about this series is that nothing is as it appears. Tami Hoag does a great job of taking what you think are separate threads and weaving them together into a complicated and intricate plot so tight that when you are finished with the book, you are left amazed. The twists and turns are are plausible and she is able to take two murders, twenty-five years apart, and connect them in a way that is completely believable. 

 
 

This was a great installment to this series and the ending was not what I expected. I thought I had figured out the bad guy a few times, but was wrong. There’s never a dull moment in these books and I cannot wait to see what Tami Hoag has in store next for Kovac and Liska…I just hope we don’t have to wait too long!

 

Audio thoughts:I really enjoy listening to David Colacci narrate this series…he just does such a great job with the voices – even the female ones! He’s pretty consistent from book to book and the pacing and tension he adds when the scene warrants is great. I really wish Brilliance Audio would re-release Prior Bad Acts and have David Colacci narrate it so I could be caught up with this series! I’m holding out hope that it’s going to happen one of these days!!!

Books in this series:

       1.   Ashes to Ashes
       2.   Dust to Dust
       3.   Prior Bad Acts

       3.5   The 1st Victim

       4.   The 9th Girl

       5.   The Bitter Season