The book started off with a lot of promise for a thrilling read but I was left a bit disappointed. There were too many sub plots and a host of characters to get to grips with. I did like Diana as a character though, although no one seemed willing to listen to her thoughts. I lost interest in the story around halfway through due to the multiple plot lines and was left feeling frustrated with the ending. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

The Day of the Roaring is a captivating debut crime thriller that introduces DI Diana Walker, a determined and fearless detective, as she unravels a chilling case in the heart of Sheffield. When the dismembered body of a headmaster is discovered at the site of a former school, Diana is thrust into an investigation that seems to spiral into more questions than answers.

At first glance, the murder appears to be another instance of gang violence, but Diana quickly realises there's something far darker at play. With missing teachers, unreported crimes, and terrified witnesses, she finds herself chasing shadows. As her colleagues dismiss the case as routine violence, Diana knows there’s more beneath the surface, something everyone is too scared to confront.

Her relentless pursuit of the truth leads her deep into the neglected underbelly of Sheffield, uncovering a world of distrust, horrifying secrets, and a new understanding of justice. The story doesn’t shy away from serious and sensitive topics, tackling themes of silence, fear, and the lengths people will go to protect themselves. These subjects are handled with care and respect, making the book both gripping and thought-provoking. While the content may be distressing to some, the author’s approach ensures these important issues are given the attention they deserve.

DI Diana Walker is a complex, multi-dimensional character whose personal stakes in the case make her investigation feel deeply resonant. The Day of the Roaring is not just a crime thriller but a sharp exploration of the silence that often surrounds crimes and the power of uncovering uncomfortable truths.

This book is a thrilling and emotional ride, offering readers an exciting start to what promises to be an excellent series. For fans of hard-hitting crime fiction with a strong emotional core, The Day of the Roaring is an unmissable read.

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I did struggle with this book. I found the plot to be quite slow and it covered (I felt) too many 'heavy' topics, including FMG, drug dealing, financial crimes and sexual crimes. DI Diana Daniels is a black detective, tenacious but basically overlooked by her male colleagues. With so many 'lines of enquiry' the plot became more confusing than it need to be.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for an advance copy of this book.

Police procedural and a lot more besides - very good.

Diana is a Afro-Caribbean detective inspector called in to investigate a gruesome murder. Struggling against unhelpful colleagues, she encounters a heap of issues surrounding women and Afro-Caribbean women in particular. With an insight into all sorts of criminal activity, the novel is very much about the plight of women - then and now. The characters are particularly well-drawn and the plot moves along well, with added poetic descriptions at times. It's a very good detective novel. Recommended. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The premise of this one sounded so good. The severed head of the former headmaster of a school that is being demolished is found in a locked filing cabinet on site. Add on to this a female DI - Diana Walker, a Black woman who has moved from Sheffield for reasons that aren’t apparent at the beginning and who is having to contend with racism and sexism from her colleagues and whose relationship with her mother is strained. However, thread after thread seemed to be added to the mix - organised crime, drug running over county lines, fraud and even female genital mutilation (FGM). For me it was almost too much, Walker was trying to tie everything together and going against her superiors. Not only that but there was her mother’s book club and the women involved in that and her MaMa - her grandmother - who had come over from Kenya and was part of an action against British soldiers in the 1950s. So many threads and characters and I feel that there was too much going on. It was a dark read at times and the sections about FGM were hard reading. As for DI Walker, she was up against it, no one believed that this case was not about organised crime and she was out on her own a lot of the time, aided by Robertson who she was able to rely on. For me this fell short and I felt the tension was lacking and the use of dialect and jargon did not help. It was slow going at times but the way that everything tied up at the end was quite clever, even if it seemed a bit rushed. Any one of these threads would have worked perfectly on their own and I feel that pushing them all together diluted some of the themes which was a pity.

I have mixed feelings about this book as I felt it wasn’t quite sure about itself. It seemed like too many crimes being linked in tenuous ways. Was the book about fgm, drug dealing, financial crimes or sexual crimes? They were all in the book but linked in a rather tenuous way.

I won’t say I enjoyed the book but nor did I not enjoy it.

I wasn't a fan of this one. The setting wasn't nearly enough, being from near Sheffield, and it felt rather predictable.

There were parts of the book I really struggled with but the backdrop of Sheffield, a special place in my heart, and the fantastic main character were real.positives fore, I just unfortunately felt overwhelmed with a lot of heavy topics that created a dissonance for me

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me, which is rare as I like to power through. At 20% I found I did not care and was frustrated with the characters/story. The finial annoying plot was that the filing cabinet was identified as coming from a specific room. Unless it has it written on the side. how? One tends to look like another.
Also I had to keep reminding myself that this was not set in the '80's which is what it sounded like sometimes.
A very promising start but too many plot lines and themes for me which made the writing clunky.
Thank you for the ARC.

Beautifully written, atmospheric and descriptive with a solid plot.
A little long for me but still an excellent read.

The Day of the Roaring was a mixed read for me. It’s a police procedural set in Sheffield which begins with the investigation led by DI Diana Walker into the discovery of a dismembered body of a former head found on the grounds of a derelict school.
I thought the novel started out really well, I liked the Sheffield setting, the style of writing and found DI Walker an engaging and believable character.
I did find it overlong and felt that the author tried to cover too many sensitive and important issues in one novel. This meant that at times focus was lost and so my attention drifted. However it is a promising novel, I enjoyed the writing style and I will look forward to the author’s future novels.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.
3.5 stars

A decapitated headmaster is found in a filing cabinet on a derelict school. site. in Sheffield DI Walker will need to trawl the myriad of people with motive and anger at the school and the manner of its closing. Well paced and entertaining read.

This was a very low start with many topics and characters being developed but as the story went on it was much easier to read. I have to say that I loved the character DI Walker who made things very clear how women are treated often in male dominated occupations and indeed family life as well. There are lots of individual stories which in many ways deviated from the main grizzly crime and in my mind was the author trying too hard to show her understanding of life. Nina has shown that she is an excellent writer and I would like to think that following this debut that she will use DI Walker in a series to follow the other parts of this book in much more depth. (Gun running, drugs and county lines FGM and the other cultural and community issues that she explains so well). With so many additional topics the writing style seems varied and difficult to follow in places. The idea of using the Northern dialect for some of the characters was a good idea but this seems to get reduced as the story progresses. I was amazed at the information about FGM and the results for these women during the procedure and all the many after effects caused by it. This was extremely well written in a gentle but firm way.
I have to say that despite my observations I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to seeing more by this author.

Sheffield has been my home city for many years and I enjoy reading novels about it (Russ Thomas, Lesley Glaister and Phillip Hensher to name just a few authors) to give me a different perspective on life here. However, I was very disappointed in this one - there were so many mistakes in the location of places ( e.g where is the Bullring, Broomgrove allotment, obs and gynae floor at NGH?) and the geography that I found it really difficult to. read. Also " Legley Road High School" bears such an uncanny resemblance to a sheffield school in the same area that was closed for similar reasons that I wondered if the author had a personal history with it and was using fiction to work through some issues!
Local topics aside, I liked Ms. Bhadreshwar's writing style and her concise descriptions, but she did cover an awful lot of issues - murder, racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, FGM, County lines, Mau Mau rebellion to name but a few - all of which are important in themselves and I feel would have benefitted from a more in depth look at one or two rather than a superficial glance at so many.
Thank you to netgalley and Harper Collins for an advance copy of this book.

I found I struggled to get into the book. Felt slow and didn't really pull me in. I gave up in all honesty.

The Day of the Roaring appeared to have everything I look for in a book - a smart, strong and ever so slightly sassy female DI and an intriguing crime. Both of these were very much there but in my opinion they were diluted by too many other threads. All of the side lines were phenomenal stories on their own but together in one book it felt all too much. I really wanted to get to know the fascinating characters but there was really so much going on, I felt the story lost something because of it. I do hope this is the first in a series as I would love to get to know DI Diana Walker more, and I know the talented author has a lot to say, I just need such hard hitting subjects in smaller chunks.

I am grateful to HarperCollinsUK and NetGalley for an eARC of this book.

Nina Bhadreshwar has debuted with a gem. This book was so much more than I had anticipated but I was hooked from the prologue.

There are a number of layers in this book. We have the body of a headteacher found, plenty of secrets to uncover, FGM, strained relationships and the case to solve. I was definitely caught up in this one.

DI Walker is a brilliant character and one that I really hope will be back for more books. She is determined, headstrong and going to solve this case regardless. This is the first book I’ve come across with FGM included. This element made me think of the training I had around this years ago.

The other characters that are in the pages are mixed. This is a plot that moved slower than I usually prefer. However, there have been layers to unpick and delve into with this one.

The Day of The Roaring is full of action and definitely keeps you guessing. This has been well written and I absolutely want to read more by Bhadreshwar. This book is the start of what I hope will become a DI Walker series. I have no hesitation in recommending this book to other readers.

This book really appealed to me and I was really happy to receive a copy through NetGalley. Gritty northern crime novels are right up my street, and I desperately wanted to love this. And initially I thought I was going to.

The Day of The Roaring starts strong. We have a grisly crime that doesn't make any sense and a compelling lead character in DI Diana Walker, a Black woman working in the police in the late 00s, who's moved away from Sheffield due to some events we aren't fully privy to at the start of the novel and is having to juggle her career and all the politics of race and gender that come with it at the same time as a complicated family life. Tie this together with some strong writing and a fairly authentic regional dialect on the page and I thought I was going to be in for a good time.

Unfortunately it falls off fairly quickly. The Sheffield dialect that works so well in the opening chapters starts to feel more like a bad parody of what northeners sound like (and I say this as a northerner, albeit from the other side of the Pennines). Half the time Bhadreshwar seems to forget that her characters are meant to speak in this way, and it's completely abandoned by the final act. And some of the decisions about how to render this speech are simply annoying; I never want to read "fk" in place of "fuck" ever again.

This is a shame because there are moments of brilliance on display in the writing. At times the prose slips into a really stunning cadence that reminds me of the best literary fiction, but the rest of the time it's a bit of a mess.

The biggest problem for me is that it doesn't really work as a mystery. It becomes obvious who the perpetrator is very early on, but none of the police who we're following pick up on this or connect the dots. This can work when it's done deliberately but here it was just frustrating, as I spent more than 300 pages wondering when the investigators were going to connect the very obvious dots. And when they do work out what's going on - right at the end, with barely 20 pages of the book left - it happens off screen, so that we're denied that "Aha!" moment that this genre thrives on. We jump from a fairly unrelated event to the arrest with no connective tissue to show us how DI Walker came to her conclusion and - crucially - how she convinced her colleagues to go along with it. This seems like a particular oversight, since so much of the narrative is concerned with how little they respect her and how they keep denying her instincts and holding back the investigation as a result. I really wanted her to get that moment of "I told you so" and it never happens.

Much like my frustrations with the writing - moments of brilliance hidden in a mess of clunky prose that feels like it needs a second draft - it's frustrating that the convoluted plot and poor research (the Bullring is in Birmingham, not Sheffield; MDMA has been a Class A drug since the 1970s; nobody has ever been in a mosh pit at a Def Leppard concert; the age of consent in the UK is 16, not 18) detract from the fact that Bhadreshwar is writing about some pretty serious issues that I don't think I've ever seen tackled in fiction. Her Afterword makes it clear that she's put a lot of time into researching FGM and speaking to people who have actually been impacted by it. I wish the final product of that work was better, because this feels like an important conversation to be having and fiction feels like a good place for it to start.

I've spent a lot of time criticising this. It's not terrible, but it feels half-baked - especially in the back end, which is demonstrably less polished than the opening. I suspect that were this not a review copy I would have DNFd somewhere around 60% as I felt things starting to unravel and the plot seemed to just be spinning in circles and never going anywhere. There's some bloat here, particularly involving sections from the point of view of a secondary character called Bruno that don't add anything and simply bog down the pacing. When it's good it's clear that it had the potential to be great, and that makes it incredibly disappointing that it's largely a failure to launch.

Complicated murder mystery which took a long time to get going, but has an intriguing concept of a headmaster's head found in a filing cabinet of a condemned school. The plot takes in numerous characters, has roots in Africa and a very well drawn north of England feel to proceedings. The detective was a conflicted character, but the novel was worth sticking with for the clever manner in which everything comes together. Was a bit slow, but still worthwhile.

Very good book with a compelling story and touching on several important but loaded and complex issues. I appreciated the generational storylines and how things tied together. It felt like an authentic take on women, and particularly women from the global majority, trying to find their safe space and a place to lift and support each other - but with the recognition that women in common have much NOT in common too! As a white woman I found this really interesting and I was definitely energised to seek more learning for myself. The story itself was satisfying too but I was left thinking about the cultural and community setting more than the featured crime, which I found noteworthy. Thank you for my ARC copy!