Hawley Reviews review: Shed No Tears

Hawley Reviews Book Rating - 3/5

Caz Frear's book, Shed no Tears, is an important book for me, as I'm about to undertake a new role helping to run Nottinghamshire Libraries online book club and in preparation for my first time hosting it in January, I've joined the other readers in the group to read her third Kinsella novel. Although it is now sometime since I read book 2, it is good to have read this one in order, because although I haven't read the first book in the series, Caz is an author that has highly complex interwoven plots and I do feel somewhat sorry for any other readers in the group who haven't read the other two. They may struggle to get the true impact of how good a writer she is because of this. Having just read two serial killer novels in the works of Sally Rigby, I can see the advantage in taking Frear's approach over Rigby's. When finding a body in a field, Caz and her partner, Parnell, soon discover her links to a serial killer. Focusing the entire book on the one case instead of Rigby's approach of focusing on a series of bodies, allows for a more in-depth look into the victim's life than Rigby was able to do, although in fairness her novels are much shorter. The complexities of Kinsella's universe and the guilt left over from the events of previous books allow the interwoven nature of this series to become extremely complicated and during the final two hours, when you discover the solution, the similarities between what happened in earlier books and this one become apparent and when taking into account the emotions that this causes I feel so glad that I'm only attempting to write a standalone myself. Frear should get an award named after her for such a complicated series. I will really enjoy discussing this with the book group and seeing what they think. I'm definitely going to have to read the first in the series so that I can interview Caz about how this series came about and how she's managed to cope with how complex it is.