Title: Her Dark Heart
Author: Carla Kovach
Series: Detective Gina Harte, #5
Published: November 2019, Bookouture
Format: ARC E-copy, 349 pages
Source: Netgalley via Publisher
Summary:
Rory is waiting at
the door of the pre-school – a painted picture of his mother Susan in
his small hand. But Susan isn’t going to see the picture, because she
has vanished.
Susan Wheeler is a devoted mother. She would
do anything for her three children. She drops them off and picks them
up every single day. Until one day when Susan kisses them goodbye and
then never comes to pick them up.
Susan’s mother Mary is
worried. Susan is recently divorced and has been finding things hard
recently, but she loves her kids – she’d never leave them.
Susan’s
sister Clare is furious. It’s just like her to go missing. It’s not the
first time, either. Susan has always been a troublemaker. Always
seeking attention. She knows Susan has been lying to the family for
years. And she knows that Susan has been sneaking out of her family home
for weeks…
As the hours turn into days, even Clare becomes
fearful for Susan. And, when Mary discovers Susan’s diary, she begins to
uncover a dark secret from her childhood. Something no one in the
family knew. When the final diary entry leads the police to a man who is
discovered dead in a local park, they’re left wondering whether Susan
has vanished because she is a victim. Or because she is a suspect…
An
explosively compelling crime thriller from bestselling author Carla
Kovach – if you love Lisa Gardner, Robert Bryndza or Clare Mackintosh,
you’ll love Her Dark Heart.
My thoughts: This
is the fifth book in the Detective Gina Harte series and I absolutely believe this
series keeps getting better and better with each new installment! It’s so addicting and compelling…I
just love when I
find these crime fiction/police procedural series with a strong female
lead.
While
this book can definitely be read as a stand-alone – something
that I am finding most books in series can be done these days – I will
say that I highly recommend reading the previous books first. There is
quite a lot of backstory on the characters that I think is helpful in
really understanding the characters more fully.
This book is a twisty procedural that is mostly told from Gina’s point a view, with a few chapters narrated by an unknown character. This chapters were chilling and disturbing and really help to amp up the tension of the book. I had so many theories as to who was behind everything and yet I never guessed correctly…I was completely blindsided when all was revealed and that’s totally ok!
The theme of secrets runs deep in this book, both in the case and in Gina’s own life. From the first moment Gina was brought onto this case, when she went to go interview Susan’s mother Mary, Gina is confronted with the fact that Mary not only looks like her own mother, but has similar mannerisms and that brings up a whole host of feelings of the past that she would rather not deal with. Will she be able to keep her personal life out of this investigation? Will she be able to look Mary in the eye and not keep thinking of her mother?
I love this series and I love that with each new installment, we get a little bit more about our beloved main character. I think the prime focus in this series is definitely the cases, and I’m ok with that, but I still like that there is some character development and I feel that we did get something here in this book. Now to see what comes next!
Books in this series:
- The Next Girl
- Her Final Hour
- Her Pretty Bones
- The Liar’s House
- Her Dark Heart
