Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Murder of a Lover" by Faith Martin

Thursday, September 21, 2023

"Murder of a Lover" by Faith Martin

Former DI Hillary Greene is continuing her work with the cold case squad at the Oxford / Kidlington Police Station. Having solved her first cold case, a 20-year-old murder, she’s now handed one that looks almost unsolvable – a 10-year-old case of an Oxford student found stabbed to death with a pair of scissors in his flat near the university.

The detective investigating the crime at the time focused his efforts on two other students, one the victim’s girlfriend. Both also rented flats in the building. As Hillary and her team slowly peel back the layers of the past, they discover a victim who saw himself as something of a sexual athlete and with a considerable number of people, women and men, who had been hurt and might have a motive for murder. But was any of these motives strong enough for murder?

Hillary’s stalker, whom we me in the previous novel, Murder Never Retires, starts becoming more aggressive. The reader knows who he is from the start; what we learn now is that he had previously stalked other women. When the relationships didn’t go as the stalker expected, they ended very badly indeed for the women being stalked. And the stalking of Hillary is taking a turn for the dark. She and her new boss decide to fake a relationship and force the stalker into the open, except there’s very little faked from the beginning.

Faith Martin

Murder of a Lover is the 13^th DI Hillary Greene mystery novel by Faith Martin. As with its predecessors, it’s fascinating to watch Hillary solve cases other detectives can’t, looking at facts, speculation, and motives in a completely different light. And so far, she’s solved everything handed to her. Her teams has its strengths and weaknesses – a retired police detective, a young man who’s eager to learn police work, and another student who’s less interested in the work at hand and more interested in pursuing Hillary’s boss.

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.