Blood Detective Dan Waddell

Audio Book excellent listen heard it in two sittings on the train to and from Plymouth. Murder mystery with a link to the past and a family history research strangely compelling and loads of period detail and information on London.

Amazon Blurb

As dawn breaks over London, the body of a young man is discovered in a windswept Notting Hill churchyard. The killer has left Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his team a grisly, cryptic clue... However it’s not until the clue is handed to Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full message becomes spine-chillingly clear. For it leads Barnes back more than one hundred years - to the victim of a demented Victorian serial killer… When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes’s skills more than ever. Because the murderer’s clues appear to run along the tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and now. And if Barnes is right about his blood-history, the killing spree has only just begun… From the author of the bestselling Who Do You Think You Are? comes a haunting crime novel of blood-stained family histories and gruesome secrets. . .

A brilliant book bursting with new ideas and a high-tension plot that keeps the pages turning right up until the heart-stopping climax. The story weaves seamlessly from a modern day serial killer investigation to the sinister events of more than a century ago. The writer shows a real relish for London old and new, bringing to life the dark and teeming streets of the Victorian city and the dusty but intriguing world of the various libraries, warehouses and depositaries where the past refuses to stay buried. Surprisingly, it's the headlong charge through the outwardly dull-seeming world of genealogical records that proves the most captivating element in the hunt for the killer. There are vivid, atmospheric descriptions of the labyrinthine places where these secrets can be uncovered that make you want to start hunting yourself - although it's far better to do it in the company of Detective Inspector Grant Foster and genealogist Nigel Barnes.