Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Murder Never Misses" by Faith Martin

I’ve discovered I don’t like stalker novels, even when they’re well-written and gripping.

Murder Never Misses, the 14th novel in the DI Hillary Greene series by British author Faith Martin, is the third in a row with a substantive stalker sub-theme. We know who the stalker is – a policeman working in Greene’s own Oxford / Kidlington police station. And we know who the victim is – Greene herself. We also know that he has stalked before, and he likes to visit a nearby woods and talk with “his girls.”

Narrowly escaping a serious injury at the hands of the stalker in the previous story, Greene convinces her superintendent to allow her to investigate the cold cases of three missing women, while another officer investigates her stalker case. It’s a dicey request – they know the same stalker was involved in the earlier disappearances.

As the investigations get underway, a college student assigned to Greene’s team is unknowingly feeding details about the cases to the stalker himself, and Greene and her colleagues are finding themselves outguessed at every turn. All the time the tension is mounting.

Faith Martin

Murder Never Misses is the kind of story you can’t read in one sitting with a experiencing a serious case of high blood pressure. Better to set it down for a time while you recover.

In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.

This installment of the Hillary Greene books will keep you on the edge of your seat, even with frequent breaks. My advice: read it, but make a point of not reading it before falling asleep.