Cover Your Tracks

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

This book is the 3rd in the DI Helen Birch series, and centres around a man, Robertson Bennet, who walks into Helen’s police station to report his mother and father missing. It seems like a case that doesn’t warrant too much work on it, but it turns into one of Helen’s biggest cases, and on more than one occasion she has to get her hands dirty. Robertson is an unlikable character, who misses his parents for only one reason - money. The story also includes the ongoing issues in Helen’s private life with her brother, Charlie,
I love this series of books, Helen Birch is a great character, and has many flaws. But she is very relatable. She makes a great police officer, and not everything she does is by the book.
The story was easy to follow, was fast paced, every page had something new on it, and was the best in the series so far. Looking forward to seeing what Helen gets up to next.
Would highly recommend.

Edinburgh based DI Helen Birch takes on an unusual missing persons case. when a man walks in to the station demanding hat the police find his long estranged and now elderly parents. As Birch and her DC Amy Kato make some preliminary enquiries they both begin to think there is more to uncover.
Birch is distracted by her family life - younger brother Charlie is serving out a sentence and may be suffering for his connection with her, her own estranged father seems to want to make contact, and she’s neglecting dishy boyfriend Anjan, who happens to be Charlie’s lawyer.
Askew’s writing is beautiful with a strong sense of place - this is not the Edinburgh the tourists see, but the ignored places where people are living out their lives. I found the sympathetic portrayal of the families the pair encounter moving. The plotting was deftly done and I found myself ,keen to get back to the novel whenever I had to put it down.
This is the third novel featuring DI Birch, all of them dealing in some way with the consequences of crime and the wide ranging effects on people affected. You could easily treat them as stand alone novels but you’ll be tempted to read them all.

Cover Your Tracks sees a return for DI Helen Birch in this the second book in a series by Claire Askew and like the previous book this is a very good police procedural with many twists and turns that will keep you hooked until the very last page.

The storyline is well told and the main characters clearly identifiable which all adds to the book

This is developing into an excellent series and one I would thoroughly recommend