Fourth in the DI Tom Thorne British police procedural series in which a cold case that retired cop Carol Chamberlain is working on ties together with a current one featuring rival crime gangs. Twenty years ago, Gordon Rooker attempted to set the daughter of a local crime boss on fire--but he got the wrong girl, instead igniting her best friend Jessica who was horribly burned and committed suicide a couple of years later. Carol worked on that case and now she's getting phone calls saying "I burned her." The problem is, Rooker is still in prison. Upon being questioned by Thorne, he says he didn't really do it, though he confessed at the time because being in prison was safer than outside where the crime boss who wanted to hire him would have easier access. A sudden string of dead gang members between Billy Ryan's gang and a new Turkish group sets up a task force throwing Thorne into the fray with a DCI he's crossed swords with before. I really enjoyed this one--hard to put down, with a few twists and turns to the plot though nothing really surprising as I did anticipate what was going to happen with the main plot before it did. If the book had a fault, it was the wishy-washy, predictable ending, which seemed to do little but set the scene for the next in series.
This was fairly good, the only reason I don't rate it higher--after reading 2/3 which I thought was okay then after an event that happened it just seemed to stand still for too long before the story proceeded again and by then it was kind of boring until nearly the end, I don't like books have a lag like that but I managed to get through it.
