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Everyone Lies    by A. D. Garrett Amazon.com order for
Everyone Lies
by A. D. Garrett
Order:  USA  Can
Minotaur, 2014 (2014)
Hardcover, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Hilary Williamson

Here's an outstanding new Anglophile mystery (a series too, I hope!) - Everyone Lies by A. D. Garrett. The lead is DCI Kate Simms, who once was on 'a career path carved out of pure gold.'

Kate worked with forensics expert Professor Nick Fennimore at the National Crime Faculty. When his wife and small daughter disappeared, she bent the rules very seriously to help him, and has not been trusted ever since. Nick's wife was found dead and, five years later, he still searches for his daughter Suzie and agonizes over her fate. Nick teaches in Aberdeen now and is very impressed by a rather mysterious but exceptionally gifted student, Josh Brown.

As the mystery opens, the author introduces readers to young women in a very risky profession - prostitutes who permit extreme physical abuse by a mysoginistic sadist in exchange for drugs. She also shows us one young woman, Marta, a sex worker who does not use drugs and appears to have her own agenda - what can it be? And how does this all relate to DCI Simms?

Kate's been tasked with a six-monthly crime review, which has come up with an excess of mostly female overdoses in Manchester. There's been another death, this one with media potential. Kate calls on Nick as a forensics consultant, but keeps it from her bosses, especially Stuart Gifford, who followed her from London to Manchester and has it in for her. In fact, the only support Kate gets from superiors is from DS 'Tanno' Tanford.

It's a nicely convoluted mystery with intriguing characters who have rich back stories, clearly not all revealed here. Kate pursues her case, despite her superiors' distrust and her husband Kieran's resentment of the time it takes from their children. A threat of suspension does not stop her but then danger reaches close to home. Jeffery Deaver says that Garrett 'has done for Manchester what The Wire did for Baltimore.' Everyone Lies is totally gripping, not to be missed.

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