After reading Victoria Dowd’s first Smart Women’s Mystery series, in its isolated country house, island isolation is where I was going next, with Kate Rhodes’ Ben Kitto series and the Scilly Isles.
By the 6th book in the series, I’m well used to Ben Kitto as a character. After I interviewed Kate on UK Crime Book Club, following me reading the 4th book, I did wonder what she could do to Ben next? But then comes The Brutal Tide, book 6 of what is currently a 7 book series.
Kate has done well in the past not to refer to how Ben came to the Isles too much. This allowed her in this one to base one third of the plot entirely on his past as an undercover cop. This allowed for really good drips of tension throughout the book with chapters that were only 2-3 minutes long from the point of view of the character hunting Ben. But as a consequence of this, there needed to be other stories that ran alongside it, too.
With it being so long since I read the other books in the series, I couldn’t tell you exactly what every plot line covered before by Kate is, but she managed to choose two other plot lines for this book which were needed to fill the book out. At 8 hours 46 minutes, it could have perhaps done with being a little bit longer given the number of strands in the book, but this allowed for fast paced tension and a lot of drip fed scenes from well loved characters in the series, not forgetting the dog.
I’m really looking forward to reading book 7 and talking to Kate at the Newark Book Festival about why the Scilly Isles makes such a great backdrop for crime fiction.
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