BOOK REVIEW: Ask The River

TITLE: Ask The River: Part Two of The Leveller Trilogy
AUTHOR: Dan Wheatcroft
PUBLISHED BY: Independantly published

I thoroughly enjoyed this second installment of the Leveller Trilogy which follows on from Book 1 ‘The Road To Eden Is Overgrown’.The books can be read out of order but to recognise all the characters in the multiple plots it is better to start at Book 1; all books can equally be read as stand-alone stories. This is a great second installment with a strong storyline and some strong recognisable characters.

DCI Thurstan Baddeley is at a loose end with nothing to do, he has too much time on his hands; he agrees to investigate a minor job for one of his team. It seems like a good idea but it gradually gets put on hold as things go back to normal job-wise on the streets of Liverpool; the jobs start to line up and it's not long before DCI Thurstan suspects he has another problem to deal with.

This three part action-packed police procedural thriller series is once again set in Liverpool; it is exciting and very well written with plenty of twists and turns. It is evident that the author has police experience; the story concerns day-to-day policing in the UK, except there are two subplots intertwining around the day-to-day policing; one has international implications descending from WWII and the other involves a serial killer.

It is a tense page-turner and I found this book as unputdownable as the previous one as I followed the investigation; I enjoyed it from beginning to end

Merseyside is once again central to the storyline and is well explored but the same can be said for a few other international destinations; the author takes readers on an affectionate excursion through destinations, characters and the merging storyline. I enjoyed meeting up with Nicks and Thurston again and am looking forward to Book 3; I’m sure readers will want more of the same.

This is a thoroughly gripping tale, with the same clever, robust characters who interact well together; it was difficult to spot the twists coming and it was worth the effort required to keep track of the complexities.

Reviewer - Anne Pritchard