Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Hillary's Final Case" by Faith Martin

Thursday, July 18, 2024

"Hillary's Final Case" by Faith Martin

DI Hillary Greene, who’s been working cold cases as a civilian advisor to the Thames Valley Police in Kidlington / Oxford, is on the brink of major life changes. Her boss and love interest, soon to be promoted Stephen Krayle, has proposed. She’s leaning toward living together. Whatever she decides, it will mean leaving the Mollern, her canal boat home, or perhaps just tying it up on the canal by Stephen’s house.

Things are also coming to a head with her team member Jake, the police department’s fair-haired boy who’s also a tech millionaire. He’s been snooping around Hillary’s computer and meeting with local crime figures. What he wants is to find his missing stepsister, whose life spiraled downward into drugs and prostitution.

As Krayle’s new job involves going after organized crime, a plan emerges: use Jake and his missing stepsister to go after one of the bigger crime figures in the area. And the cover will be a public announcement that Hillary’s team is reinvestigating a number of missing women cold cases.

Faith Martin

Hillary’s Final Case by British author Faith Martin isn’t, as it turns out, Hillary Greene’s final case. Four novels remain. And there’s nothing in the story to suggest it’s the last case she’ll work on. All we know is that she’s changing home addresses, but she’s still in the same Kidlington / Oxford area.

But it is a classic Hillary Greene story. Martin comes up with more twists that only Greene can see coming. And it’s a cracking good story, filled with a number of tension-filled scenes.

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.