Book Review: Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths

About the Book

Is it possible to forget that you’ve committed a murder?

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late 90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost twenty years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job—as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory.

One day her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. Cassie catches up with her high-achieving old friends from the Manor Park School—among them two politicians, a rock star, and a famous actress. But then, shockingly, one of them, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. As Garfield was an eminent—and controversial—MP and the investigation is high profile, it’s headed by Cassie’s new boss, DI Harbinder Kaur, freshly promoted and newly arrived in London. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again.

Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies? It’s in Cassie’s interest to skew the investigation so that it looks like it has nothing to do with Manor Park and she seems to be succeeding.

Until someone else from the reunion is found dead in Bleeding Heart Yard…

My Review

I absolutely love this series. Elly Griffiths does such a fabulous job with characterization, whether in her Magic Men / Brighton series or this one (I haven’t yet started Ruth Galloway, but suspect the same will be true). She has a marvelous knack for crafting characters that leap off the page with their realism and believability, giving each just enough quirks and foibles to make them entirely human and yet also simultaneously entirely relatable – even when they bear no resemblance to your own life whatsoever.

In this latest Harbinder Kaur book, she has once again taken us into detective land with a unique slant that was wholly engaging and entertaining from page one through the end. The novels always read so fast – it’s a magnificent thing but also sad because it means then I once again have to wait for the next one…

This could probably be read as a standalone, although I’m not normally a fan of that and don’t often say it. The build is in personalities more than in storyline, such that you could probably start here without feeling lost. If you do though, I guarantee your interest will be peaked such that you’ll want to go back and read the first two!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.