A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey

"Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?"

The question no one wants to confront during their darkest moments because, no, we usually don't notice anything unusual.

Jane Casey's newest novel, the eleventh in the brilliant DS Maeve Kerrigan series, asks this in the opening line, and the repercussions of not realising anything was wrong haunt the characters for many years to come. Centred around both the disappearance of 9-year-old Rosalie sixteen years before and the suspicious deaths of her parents in the 'now', there are many intricate threads to be unravelled by Kerrigan and her co-worker DI Josh Derwent.

Initially, the parents' deaths seem like a tragic case of murder-suicide. Still, Kerrigan and Derwent are immediately suspicious, and once they realise the family connection to the old case, they are drawn into a much bigger situation than expected. I love the cleverness of stories like this, the little hints that there is more than meets the eye, and how it all eventually connects back to the truth, the breadcrumbs leading back to the start. While not quite a fully-fledged dual timeline, there are memories from the time of Rosalie's disappearance included; the change of pace in those chapters helped to break up the franticness of the current case.

Casey writes these stories so brilliantly; there is a reason the series is so popular. The mystery is intriguingly complicated, the turns it takes are quite unexpected, and the plot delves into particularly dark areas. Some parts of the story are as much a small spotlight on certain unsavoury elements of society as moving the narrative forward. The tension she evokes as the story evolves is the epitome of a taut police procedure.

As usual, Maeve and Josh are on stellar form banter-wise; the clever retorts, the back-and-forth, the sniping, and the worrying are all so familiar from the rest of the series but show how their relationship as colleagues and friends constantly evolves. As much as I enjoy Maeve herself as a lead character, she wouldn't be who she is in these stories without Josh. They are as much of a draw as the plot itself. On that note, while this novel can be read in its own right, I strongly recommend catching up on the previous titles in the series before diving into this one, as the backstory elements are one of the best parts of these books and can truly only be appreciated with the rest read.

Highly recommend!