#BookReview Death Note by Caroline Mitchell @bookouture @Marablaise

Death Note by Caroline Mitchell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Twenty years ago you were forced to give your daughter up. Now she’s back. Or is she?

Women who’ve had to give up children for adoption are being killed. A knock at their front door begins a nightmare from which they will never wake up.

East London Detective Ruby Preston and her team must hunt down a disturbed individual before someone else is taken. But when bodies start turning up, staged in perfect, domestic scenes, it carries the echo of a memory in Ruby's mind. The tinkling of a music box. A mother and child reunion...

Then just as Ruby thinks they've made a breakthrough, she receives a sinister email, and the case takes a terrifying personal twist.

Can Ruby catch the killer before they strike again? Or will her troubled past catch up with her first?

**********

Death Note by Caroline Mitchell is the first book in the Ruby Preston series. And, I liked it, it's a good first book. I especially liked Ruby Preston and her quite difficult home situations with her affair with a colleague and her on and off affair with an old flame on the wrong side of the law.

Now, I have to admit that the crime in this book, the abduction of the women that had given up children for adoption years ago did not thrill me that much. Sure, I found the book interesting enough and I was never bored. However, there is just something that stopped me from truly enjoying the story. Sometimes it's hard to truly explain why a book doesn't work 100% and this is one of them. It could be that we got to follow the perpetrators POV and I prefer to be kept in the dark instead of getting the killers POV. That works now and then for me, but in this case, well I was not totally enjoying the killers POV chapters. I much preferred following Ruby's investigations not to mention her problems on the home front. She has some secrets that she tries to hide, but it seems that someone knows about them...

Nevertheless, I don't want to be a total downer. I really liked the Ruby and her team. Sometimes the characters around the main characters can be a bit bland and hard to pick apart, but I enjoyed getting to know them and I'm looking forward to the next book much thanks to that. Ruby has as I wrote before a very interesting home situation and that is one of the aspects that I truly enjoyed about this book. That and the surprising ending. I have to admit that I did not see that ending coming.

Great first book in a new series and I'm looking forward to reading book 2!

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review!