This is the second book in Sally Rigby’s Cavendish & Walker series. The series takes place in Lenchester, England, and follows local Detective Chief Inspector, Whitney Walker, as she investigates a series of local murders. In the first book, Deadly Games, she made the acquaintance of Dr. Georgina Cavendish, who is a professor of forensic psychology at the local university. Having experienced profiling in the theoretical sense up until now, Cavendish found herself eager to help the local police and test out the practical applications of her knowledge.

In Fatal Justice, a body is discovered where the victim was tortured and mutilated. The police investigate the victim, but are confounded by the nature of the crime. When a second body soon turns up in the same fashion, Walker is afraid they have a serial killer on the loose. She calls on Cavendish to help with the investigation. The quest for a common thread between the two victims reveals that both men were grooming young girls online. They believe they have a vigilante on their hands.

The problem here is that if the nature of why the victims were killed were revealed, they might be hard-pressed to find any help from the public. Who would feel sympathy for a pedphile who got what was coming to them? At the same time, they can’t have people taking the law into their own hands. It’s a delicate balance to work the case.

The friendship between Whitney and George is growing. Whitney, in particular, is starting to relax enough to tease George a little more. For George, this is something that will take a bit of getting used to. It seems like she’s not always adept at reading social cues. Could that be a hint for why she’s not had any close friendships? I’ll withhold judgment on that until further into the series. Whitney has convinced her superiors on the force as to the merits of having a fornsic psychologist they can call on for help when they need it on the payroll.

George is finding it harder to balance the practical application of her studies with her work at the University. She is up for a promotion with other candidates, but her work on this case seems to get in the way. She is finding, though, that she gets more out of seeing how her studies apply to real life over just sticking with academia. It might mean there will be choices to be made, eventually, but for now she’s content to try to balance both.

The mystery isn’t one that I felt could be solved ahead of time, unlike the previous book where I figured it out pretty early on. In Fatal Justice, the reader isn’t introduced to all of the suspects to figure it out for themselves. There’s a sort of balance between revealing all too early int he book and not revealing enough for the reader to figure it out. This one seems to lean toward the latter. Is it just that the two cases were so different or is Rigby trying to show us there are no easy patterns to a police investigation?

The audiobook is read by Clare Corbett. The writing can be a bit stilted at times as Rigby has a style that I’m seeing more of from British authors as opposed to those on this side of the pond. It’s something that takes some getting used to at times, but I like how the story works blending the professional and personal together, rather than having the lives of the officers. Corbett reads it without becoming too dramatic, which wouldn’t work for this style of writing. She has a clear, distinctive voice that is a joy to listen to.

In addition to being a good police procedulral, it’s also the story of two very different women who are forging a friendship at the midpoint of their lives. Whitney is feeling a bit of the empty nest syndrome with her only daughter becoming an adult, while George is lamenting that she has no close family. The two characters have a great bond and complement each other’s lives nicely. The moral questions about whether the victims deserve what they’ve gotten also works well in the course of the novel. I enjoyed the character development of the two leads as well as the moral ambiguity of the story.

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