Boy, oh boy! this was so good. POV's included the serial killer and his thoughts going into kidnapping people and then the thrill and excitement as he anticipated what he was going to do to them. SICK and DARK! I was so completely engrossed and invested in the plot and the characters, too. Or maybe I should say I loved some of them and hated the good bad guys so much that I loved the as a bad guy. lol

Cassie Rowan is the detective in this wonderful thriller and I loved her. Not everyone in the story loved her, however, as she was simply not valued for what she did. But her value was in how well she was able to sniff out crimes and how the victims were connected to the atrocities committed against them. And I must mention that it has a lot of twists and turns as all good thrillers should. I loved how much of a mystery this truly was.

Too much crime fiction for me and I did not finish (DNF), I felt like I was reading a British procedural and that is not my vibe

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* Pretty good book, i would read more of this series. Pretty long but not drawn out.

Cassie Rowan is a young, pretty fresh detective and is a woman willing to go out on a limb to get results, the only problem being she sometimes doesn't wait for the team to get involved.
A serial rapist is walking the streets of Liverpool, targeting mainly prostitutes. He leaves them alive but no one is able to identify him, but he leaves them wrapped in a fur stole leading to his name The Furman. Cassie seems to think she has the right man in her sight but everyone, including her superiors do not agree. Has she found the right perpertator or not?
I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent book, plenty of suspense and mystery to keep me reading. Cassie is a great new character, fiesty and independant and the book portrays the struggle women can have in certain jobs these days.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest opinion

Great thriller which kept me turning the pages well into the night. Great characters and plot. Highly recommend to others!!

A brand new series and an intense read featuring DC Cassie Rowan, a no-nonsense copper on the streets of Liverpool, taking no prisoners with the villains or her colleagues. Also featured is psychiatrist Dr Alan Palmer whose clients may or may not fit the profile of the person the police are searching for.

DC Cassie Rowan is young but a bright detective with a promising future. She's had a difficult past when her parents were killed in a car accident several years before and she took over the care of her then ten year old brother Neil so he wouldn't go into care. Their older brother Alex was co-parenting with her until he got a job offer in New York and four weeks after that he was gone. Now her brother is 15 and going through the usual teenage angst issues which Cassie must now face alone with Alex now so far away.

As if parenting her 15 year old brother isn't enough, Cassie must also contend with the childish antics of her colleagues when they would much rather be sitting in a cosy warm car taking bets on her ability to catch a suspect on her own when they should be backing her up with assistance. When the suspect escapes her clutches, but not without some fight, it's Cassie who is in the firing line from her superiors and not the boys who should have been having her back.

The suspect that had absconded but may well have been caught had DCs Wicks and Finch been assisting her was wanted in connection with a string of serial rapes that have taken place on the streets of Liverpool. He doesn't kill the women...but he abducts them, robs, rapes, tortures, strangles them before reviving them to strangle them again and beats them half to death before instructing them to wash down completely and leaving them naked on the city's waste lands. Dubbed the Furman, so far he has only targeted prostitutes which is why Cassie walks the streets dressed in her cheapest get-up to blend in with the rest of the girls. But now that his MO has been exposed, he begins seeking out other innocent young women.

When Emma Hammond is discovered in the same way as the previous victims, Cassie realises he has upped the ante and changed his MO to lower risk victims. And then Penny Kominski, visiting from London, enters the police station hysterical wanting to speak to someone. It turns out she was approached and abducted by someone who did not appear as a threat until it was too late. She managed to escape and took herself to the police station to report the incident. But thus far, any descriptions of the attacker have been vague to say the least, with the suspect wearing a hoodie and scarf masking his features. Cassie knows she must find this attacker before he ups his ante yet again and this time starts killing his victims.

Also featured is Dr Alan Palmer, a psychiatrist with an equally difficult home life. He and his wife are separated and share custody of their 4 year old daughter Lucy after an incident that shattered their family and gave their daughter nightmares. Dr Palmer and his colleague Dr Atherton often share a drink or two swapping stories and case notes on current clients. They become concerned when both have clients who may or may not fit the profile of the serial rapists lurking Liverpool's darkened streets. One of them shows some disturbing behaviour in stalking and keeping track of even his psychiatrist's movements. Are they guilty or simply paranoid?

BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN is a gritty and intense read that packs a punch or two that will have you second guessing yourself in an attempt to unmask the villain. But what made me want to toss the book in anger many times were the attitudes of the likes of Wicks and the guileless Finch, who really needed to grow a pair. Wicks angered me no end with his lazy arse attitude. Firstly when he was sitting in a comfy cosy car taking bets when he should have been assisting Cassie at the beginning, then again when he failed to own up to his part in why the Furman escaped and then most notably when he flat out refused to believe one of the prostitutes, Tasha, had been raped. Instead he was adamant she had been beaten up by her pimp, of which she has none, because there was no damage to her face...only bruises where they could not be seen. And pimps don't like to damage the merchandise so therefore in Wicks' opinion Tasha was not raped but just beaten up by her pimp. And Finch? That guy really needs to grow a pair and stand up to the bullying tactics of guys like Wicks.

It's the presence of characters like those that make me not want to bother picking up another in the series because honestly I am sick to death of phallus measuring misogynistic detectives. I am tired of angst among the ranks. I want a crime thriller I can enjoy without all the bullshit.

However, if you love your crime thrillers with plenty of punch, gritty and intense...then look no further than BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN because this one just might be right up your alley. But for me, it was the supporting characters that annoyed me so much I don't wish to rejoin them again.

Recommended for fans of intense and gritty crime thrillers not for the fainthearted.

I would like to thank #MargaretMurphy, #Netgalley and #JoffeBooks for an ARC of #BeforeHeKillsAgain in exchange for an honest review.

This is my first read by Murphy. I enjoyed the way the first couple of chapters drew you into the story.
Very believable characters with lots going on. Very difficult to put down. One of those ' just another chapter' books.
Interestingly set in Liverpool, not read many books set there before.
Will look out for more of her work.

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This is the first book the Detective Cassie Rowan series, which I found surprising as when reading reading it, it felt like there had been others in the series beforehand.

Cassie is a very sassy, independent minded detective, who sometimes struggles to be a team player. She can put herself at risk and regularly finds herself in conflict with her DCI but at the same time has good detective intuition. In her own personal life she is the carer for her younger brother. I liked her and want to read more of this series when it is published.

In this book she, and the team she is part of, are on the hunt for a serial predator and rapist on the streets of Liverpool. As part of this Cassie is undercover on the streets and almost captures him but he gets away to continue his hunt. Cassie has quite strong thoughts about the killer but this at odds with all her colleagues. Who will be right?

Cassie is a really great character, but must be a nightmare to lead. There are some interesting characters around her although at times I would like to have learnt more about these characters. The book is well-written, has some good pace and twists and has a good ending with plenty of tension. I see plenty of potential for this series. Given this I am happy to recommend this series.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy of this book for me, for an an open and honest review.

Awesome psychological crime thriller! This is a gripping thriller with an interesting new police protagonist, Cassie Rowan, who doesn't always follow the rules. The plot is awesome with plenty of unexpected twists and it builds to a tense but very satisfying conclusion. I loved it

Where to begin with this one... overall probably a 2.5ish read for a slow start but honestly not a bad read and I would consider reading the next one in the series when it comes out.

Before He Kills Again is a detective thriller/mystery focused on a young English detective constable named Cassie Rowan who is trying to catch a serial rapist who primarily targets prostitutes. She has gone undercover to try and catch him and in the process gotten to know some of the victims and become personally invested in the case. After a near miss with catching "The Furman" events start to escalate and Cassie begins to take risks in an effort to catch the bad guy.

The story is told through multiple POVS including Cassie, a therapist named Alan Palmer who is arguably the second main character, and then a couple of other POVs including the classic "killer pov without knowing who the killer actually is" POV. I am sad to say that the format didn't really work for me here. Alternating POVs is a pretty standard way of telling a mystery but with this one I felt like it was jumping around too much (especially in the beginning) and I honestly had trouble focusing on the story and keeping track of what was going on.

I personally found the first half of this book to be incredibly slow. Amazon tells me it's under 400 pages but with how much I struggled to get through the first half it felt more like 600. It wasn't until after the 50% mark that I felt like things were finally picking up/coming together. Once Cassie and Alan met in the book I felt like the story really took off, there was a lot more investigation happening/clues appearing and I think having these two characters interact really helped turn the story around. In the first half of the book the two "main" characters exist completely independent of each other and it makes the story feel disjointed; there's a lot going on but it's hard to know what to actually care about. Also, Cassie is a hard to like character (something which I think is intentional so I'm not counting that as a negative per se) and having Alan to play off really made her more tolerable.

My main issue is that this honestly did not feel like the first book in a series. There are a lot of allusions to things that happened in the characters' pasts but we don't get the details about those things until too late in the book imo. Because it takes so long to find out their ~tragic backstories it's hard to care overly much about Cassie and Palmer until later in the book. I felt like I should be invested in them but I hadn't been given any real reason to and that was a problem. If you told me that these characters were side characters in another series and this was their spinoff I wouldn't have been surprised at all because I felt like the author often wrote as though assuming the reader knew things about the characters when we hadn't been given that info yet.

That being said! Once we find out more of their backstories I did enjoy the information we got about the characters and found them to be compelling. I would absolutely read more books about these characters if the stories were more like the second half of the book than the first as I really enjoyed the dynamic that developed between Cassie and Palmer by the end of this. The pace also picks up dramatically in the second half of the book and once it gets going I was hooked. I found it to be very engaging and actually stayed up late to finish it. I also thought that the author developed a good foundation to build the next book on, there are still characters to explore and I could very easily see some of the things that were left unresolved in this book carrying over into the next one.

A lot of people really loved this and I can see why but unfortunately, this book (or more accurately the first half of it) just wasn't really for me. It wasn't bad by any means but I personally didn't love it and the slow start was a big hurdle to overcome. I did see a lot of potential in the series/characters though and would absolutely consider reading the next book!

A thrilling read that grasped my attention from the start.
As if Cassie doesn't have enough going on already as she in chasing down a serial killer, she then has to fight against her own team who are also conspiring against her.
A well written book with a well plotted story line. It has the right pace to keep you wanting more and keeps you guessing right to the very last page.

A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Cassie has enough troubles chasing a serial killer without having her own team working against her. She almost had him except for one of her team, was it just carelessness or something else.
A good book with plenty of action to keep you guessing until the end.

This book was not enjoyable. This was my first time reading a netgalley book, so perhaps my expectations were too high, but I felt like I was reading a draft, not a manuscript that was close to publication. It needed a lot more editing. I contemplated taking notes to keep track of what was going on.

This is the first book in the series featuring Detective Cassie Reeves. Cassie is sent to work undercover as a prostitute on the streets of Liverpool as there is a serial rapist on the loose who appears to be targeting prostitutes. He is know as The Forman and he abducts, tortures and rapes his victims. Unfortunately Cassie’s undercover operation fails and he escapes but now knows who Cassie is and has her down as his next target. We learn that after her parents were killed in an accident Cassie is left to bring up her 16 year old brother and she isn’t afraid to follow her instincts even if it puts her at loggerheads with her boss and colleagues. She has a prime suspect but as he has alibis the team thinks she is totally wrong. I really enjoyed this book, it has a complex plot and plenty of twists and turns. I look forward to book number two in the series.
Thanks to Netgalley and Joffre Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a gripping psychological crime thriller with an intriguing new police protagonist, Cassie Rowan, who doesn't always follow the rules. The plot is tortuous with plenty of unexpected twists and it builds to a tense but very satisfying conclusion.

The dynamics of the police team are interesting and I also enjoyed the insight into the work of the psychological therapists. The City of Liverpool and its wintery weather are ever present and help to heighten the tension. The book does describe violent crime against women but concentrates on emotional responses while avoiding very graphic descriptions of the physical attacks.

This was a gritty, dark read. I enjoyed the twists and turns and found the characters to be intriguing. In looking forward to reading more.

This was a dark, gritty, fast paced, edgy thriller with such twists and turns that made me feel anxious at times. I read a lot of crime thrillers but very few have made me feel the need to take a breather while reading them because the twists and the disturbing description of the crimes committed have been quite overwhelming to my senses.

Phew it was intense!!

This is the first book in the series involving DC Cassie Rowan and psychoanalyst Alan Palmer and the first book I have read by the author Margaret Murphy.
I received an e-Arc of the book from the publisher Joffe Books and the author via NetGalley.

Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Thanks to netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review I enjoyed the twists and turns

I was given a copy from the publisher via NetGalley....


I enjoyed this book. I’m a huge fan of police procedures and British series are a favorite.. this story had me guess right up to the end. Can’t wait to read more from the series.

Thanks to netgalley for the opportunity to read this book. Thus is the first Margaret Murphy book I've read. Unfortunately I found it a bit slow and difficult to follow.