The Ex by Diane Saxon
Published by Boldwood Books
Publication Date: 2 March 2021
Genre: Mystery & Thrillers
My thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book ahead of publication in exchange for my honest opinion.
Book Description:
Sometimes your past just won't let go...All NEW from Diane Saxon
As a heat wave grips the country, DS Jenna Morgan is called to a domestic incident at the home of a young family in Ironbridge.
Pregnant Imelda Cheetham-Epstein has been found unconscious by her husband, Zak with serious head injuries.
When Jenna arrives on the scene, she discovers something even more disturbing – the couple's eleven-month-old son, Joshua, is missing and the race against time begins to find him.
Is this an accident or something more sinister?
Are the two incidents linked?
Or has something in the Cheetham-Epstein's past caught up with them?
My Thoughts:
A word of warning: this is the fourth book in a series, something I wasn't aware of until I came to write my review. That said, it clearly worked well as a stand alone novel as I didn't feel like I had missed huge chunks of the story. DS Jenna Morgan has a pretty traumatic history in her police career that much is evident but I didn't feel that the previous incidents totally overwhelmed this story as sometimes can happen. She's a good strong character who has learned how to cope with her demons.
The location of the story in the Black Country made a nice change as we don't seem to have many writers setting their books around Ironbridge and the intense heatwave was an excellent pressure cooker environment to add to the time constraints needed to find a missing one year old child. Little Joshua has disappeared during the violent attack on his mother but the detectives are suspicious of dad Zak as he claims not to have heard anything despite being in the property at the time.
The book is cleverly written as the reader knows exactly who has carried out the attack and to an extent why but the finer details run far deeper than events suggest. It took me a good while to get even close to the facts but I did get a gut feeling part way through the story so the 'reveal' wasn't as big a shock as it could have been.
There are a couple of truly shocking and disturbing scenes in the book but you can't really put any trigger warnings on it without giving away the whole story which I felt was well written and tackled some very real issues. Some of the more peripheral characters felt particularly realistic.
I would like to go back and revisit the earlier books in the series to get better background on the detectives side of things to see how their characters have developed from the start.
About the Author:
Diane Saxon lives in the Shropshire countryside with her tall, dark, handsome husband. She has two gorgeous daughters, a Dalmatian, two cats, numerous rare breed chickens, and a black Labrador called Beau--a name borrowed by her hero in For Heaven's Cakes.
After working for years in a demanding job, Diane gave it up when her husband said, "Follow that dream." She subsequently had 12 Romances published for the U.S. market then turned to the dark side with her psychological thrillers. With a four-book deal through Boldwood Books, her first in series, Find Her Alive was released in 2019 followed by Someone's There in February 2020. What She Saw is her latest release in September 2020 and Diane is head down currently editing Book 4.
Find her at her website https://dianesaxon.com/ or on Twitter: @Diane_Saxon
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