The Burning: Jane Casey

From the summary at Amazon:

Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious detective constable, keen to make her mark on the murder task force. Her male colleagues believe Maeve’s empathy makes her weak, but the more she learns about the latest victim, Rebecca Haworth, from her grieving friends and family, the more determined Maeve becomes to bring her murderer to justice. But how do you catch a killer no one has seen when so much of the evidence has gone up in smoke?

This is another mystery novel that focuses on the search for a serial killer. The bodies that are found are gruesome but there is not a lot of violence. The emphasis is on the methodical sifting through clues, and data, and CCTV tapes looking for evidence to solve the crime.

I thought this was a fine police procedural. I liked the emphasis on Maeve as the lone female policewoman in her group, and the issues that this caused (for her). It was realistic (I think) in that many men she worked with treated her well, others went out of their way to poke fun or make things difficult for her. Yet, Maeve is always determined to do a good job and keeps plugging away. There are no perfect characters in this book; all of them are human with flaws, arguing and making mistakes.

For me, the element that elevated this beyond the standard police procedural was the use of two primary narrators, both female. The alternation between the two gives the reader some insight into knowledge that Maeve does not have.

I also liked that this had a very exciting finish. I felt the resolution was fairly obvious, but I was still glued to the book in the last 75 pages.

Check out these reviews which came out closer to when the book was originally published: At Petrona, and at Reactions to Reading.

I initially was offered this book to read by the publisher. There was a limited time to access it and I saw that I was going to miss that, so I purchased the e-book.

There are more books in this series and I am interested in trying the next one. When I finished this book, I read the first chapter of The Reckoning provided at the end of the e-book and it was appealing.

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Publisher:  Minotaur Books; Reprint edition (August 30, 2011); originally pub. 2010
Length: print length 368 pages
Format: e-book

Series:  Maeve Kerrigan, #1
Genre:  Mystery, Police Procedural