The Sound of Broken Glass

by Deborah Crombie

on Tour Feb 24th – March 31st, 2014

Book Details:

Genre: Mystery

Published by: William Morrow

Publication Date: February 25, 2014

Number of Pages: 384

ISBN: 9780061990649

Purchase Links:

Synopsis:

In the past. . .home to the tragically destroyed Great Exhibition, a solitary thirteen-year-old boy meets his next-door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal.

In the present. . .On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is back on the job while her husband, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, is at home caring for their three-year-old foster daughter. Assigned to lead a Murder Investigation Team in South London, she’s assisted by her trusted colleague, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Their first case: a crime scene at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. The victim: a well-respected barrister, found naked, trussed, and apparently strangled. Is it an unsavory accident or murder? In either case, he was not alone, and Gemma’s team must find his companion—a search that takes them into unexpected corners and forces them to contemplate unsettling truths about the weaknesses and passions that lead to murder. Ultimately, they will question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most.

REVIEW: I received a copy of this book for free as part of a blog tour with Partners in Crime Tours, all opinions expressed below are my own.

Once again, I accepted to review this book knowing full well that it’s a recent installment in a long-running series (book #15, to be exact). And once again I am pleased to let you know that it really didn’t impact my overall feelings on this book. There were a few spots where it would have been nice to have a little bit of background information (especially regarding Charlotte and how she came to Gemma and Duncan). So while I think it reads relatively well as a standalone, there were a few questions in my mind that reading the previous books would have definitely been helpful.

I really enjoyed the characters in this book. Having no knowledge of previous books, I don’t know who is normally the main protagonist. In this particular one its Gemma and Melody doing most of the work on the cases. With the rather large list of characters that appear to be regulars in this series, I think it would be interesting to see who takes the “lead” next. At one point in this book Gemma has to explain to Duncan that the mother that she has met during playdates with Charlotte is actually extremely important, wealthy and famous, and he has absolutely no clue that she is anything other than your typical stay-at-home mom. It definitely made me laugh out loud at how clueless he was! Just little things like that definitely add to the characters’ personalities that make them really appealing to me.

This particular installment has a “past” and “present” storyline going on. The past is interspersed with the present day storyline. I really enjoyed seeing how they eventually began to weave together and in the end came out in a surprising manner. I was scratching my head more than once trying to figure out where they connected, but once they did it was really interesting to see how Gemma and Melody would piece everything together.

Overall I felt like this was a very good book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was fast paced and there were many times in the second half of the book that I actually had to force myself to put it down. I really liked this one and am definitely looking forward to meeting this cast of characters again!

Highly recommended.

Read an excerpt:

Browse Inside The Sound of Broken Glass: A Novel by Deborah Crombie

Author Bio:

Deborah Crombie is a native Texan who has lived in both England and Scotland. She lives in McKinney, Texas, sharing a house that is more than one hundred years old with her husband, three cats, and two German shepherds. Visit Deborah at her website, connect with her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter.