Alex Palmer is an excellent writer and her stories are unputdownable. They are powerful stories told with vigour, purpose and insight. I highly recommend the Harrigan and Grace series of which Blood Redemption is the first in the series followed by The Tattooed Man (2008) and, lastly, The Labyrinth of Drowning (2009). Could there be anymore in the works? I sincerely hope so.
Blood Redemption (2002) is the winner of the 2002 Canberra Critics Circle Award for Literature as well as the winner of the 2003 Davitt Award for Crime.
Paperback: Matthew Liu sees his parents gunned down on a lonely Sydney backstreet. A young woman, the killer, stares him in the face before fleeing the scene. When the police arrive, all they find is the discarded gun.
Detective Inspector Paul Harrigan's unit is pitched into a high-profile investigation with little to go on. Who is the young woman? How can she have vanished into thin air?
When DC Grace Riordan follows up a connection between one of the victims and a termination clinic, the pieces start to fall into place, but Grace is forced to confront some personal demons.
Harrigan has demons of his own to contend with. Burned badly in the past for refusing to turn a blind eye to police corruption, he suspects that his current team and investigation are being subtly sabotaged. Then he discovers that his own son is in email contact with the killer and that the young woman's bloody rampage is far from over. And with a single phone call the killer draws Harrigan and Grace into her trap.
About the author: Alex Palmer was born in London in 1952. Her father abandoned her family when she was very young and they left England when she was five to live variously in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, arriving in Sydney in the late 1960s. Here, she studied English literature and language at Macquarie University and later sat for a postgraduate diploma in information management at the University of New South Wales.
Alex has travelled extensively in Australia and in Asia, Europe, Britain and North America. After a working life which has included occupations as diverse as geriatric nursing to automated systems design, she now writes full time. She is married and lives in Canberra.
Rating: 5/5
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