Someone Else's Skin by Sarah HilaryMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Funny how things work out sometimes. I was browsing new paperbacks in Asda, liked the look of and purchased ‘Tastes Like Fear’ by Sarah Hilary, only to find out that this was number 3 in her crime series featuring D.I. Marnie Rome. Reading some of the cover notes seemed to indicate that I needed to read numbers 1 and 2 first. I went ahead and bought the Kindle version of ‘Someone Else’s Skin’, number 1 in the series. This work won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2015, a very worthy and superbly disturbing debut novel.
DS Marnie Rome is 28 when her parents are murdered by their 14-year-old foster son, Stephen and the story opens as Rome arrives at her former home to see it turned into a crime scene, an officer leaving the building bearing the murder weapon: "Mum's bread knife, its steel teeth full of tattered red skin." She is kept outside by her boss, who lowers her, keening, to the pavement. Five years on, Rome is a successful, trusted DI, her foster brother locked up, her own shadows locked deep inside, when she's landed with a case that will bring her face to face with her "worst fear: the stigma of victimhood”….
This is a fantastic entry to the thriller scene, which seems to be densely populated at the moment. Deftly written, unobtrusively, subtly drawing readers into the cold, wet world of London, where "the sky's empty, grey, as if someone has dragged a tarpaulin across it", where "the rain kept coming, as if someone had unplugged the sky, sheets of the stuff, thick and chilly”. It is a corker: twisty, tricksy and, on occasion, seriously scary. There is a moment when I found it almost impossible to keep reading, the scene Hilary has created is so upsetting, but almost impossible not to, the story is so hell-for-leather compelling.
This is an extraordinarily good debut, utterly creepy, without being gratuitous, and an exciting start to this series. I’m off to download number 2….
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