A review by pgchuis
Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham

3.0

Fiona Griffiths is a DC in Cardiff, working on two cases; one embezzlement by a former police officer and the other the deaths of a woman and her daughter in a squat. The novel started off promisingly and I liked Fiona's voice, but as we learnt more and more about her

mental health, I became almost uneasy. I suppose the author did a good job of demonstrating how fragile her mental health was, but it made for a stressful read. At the very end, when the revelation of Fiona's diagnosis during the missing two years came, it made me wonder about the exact range of symptoms she seemed to have. Were they all attributable to her diagnosis/PTSD? I also wondered how she had managed to reach her mid-twenties without ever having seen her birth certificate...

I had initially also thought this was going to be a fairly straight police procedural with a quirky heroine (the holy grail of crime fiction for me!) but it all got a bit much:

Fiona's mentor Lev of the secret martial arts skills, Fiona's query criminal father who arranged for her to acquire a gun and ammunition, Fiona goes it alone and takes down all the armed baddies etc etc

I'm not sure I'll read any more, but I can see that other people might really enjoy this series.