The Cassie Raven series has powerful legs and the blood of crime fiction beats relentlessly. It’s tight, controlled writing at its most invigorating.
Short, action-packed chapters provide a breathless, excitement that builds anticipation as the plot moves towards a series of climaxes, each with a sub-plot that is worthy of an integral short story itself. Turner has a masterful control of pace and cadence. This is the second in the Cassie Raven series, which began with Body Language, and there are recurring references to the death of her ex-teacher, Geraldine Edwards, the victim of that first book. Life Sentence delves deeply into the medical aspects of post-mortems and dead bodies in general, and occasionally readers might reach for a medical dictionary. Our believable main character is no stranger to death, but how will Cassie cope with uncovering the truth behind her father’s claims. She is an orphan with troubled teenage years who finds out that she has a father – released on licence from a life sentence for killing her mother! They meet, and he says he was innocent. Life Sentence is based in a mortuary, where technician Cassie Raven, a goth with a scalpel mind as well as a cutting day job, talks affectionately to her dead charges as she pulls them out of the cold into the starkly bright strip lighting of the post-mortem suite. It’s subtle, enthralling and a modern take on a ‘who done it?’. Likely characters appear, each one joining or replacing possible suspects. Turner, in the thrilling and well-paced Life Sentence, re-writes that rule. Crime fiction readers can often spot the villain from the first innocuous, innocent introduction.
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