Judith Sullivan is a writer in Leeds, originally from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris. Fluent in French, she’s pretty good with English and has conversational Italian and German. She is working to develop her Yorkshire speak.
Candy Denman seems to have hit her stride with this second literary outing for Jocasta Hughes, full-time GP and part-time sleuth.
As the title suggests, Body Heat features several fires. Not little piddly ones, but big blazes that reduce anything or anybody in their wake to coal-like dust.
The first victim (a tad inconsiderately for Jocasta) meets her end early on a Sunday morning. Hughes is called to the grim scene featuring a charred automobile and a victim (that one one cop refers to as crispy bacon). Hughes moonlights as a police doctor, entrusted with officially declaring the deadness of dead people in Hastings.
Being Jocasta, however, she is not content to just do the duty and cash the cheques. The first Body Heat victim speaks to Jocasta from the other side. In this case, the positioning of the lethal automobile suggests the death was no accident. Or so Jocasta tells her Doctor Watson cum best-buddy Kate, a solicitor.
Victim Sarah Dunsmore is followed just a week later by Carol Johnson, whose charred remains suggest a repeat offender in the making.
As do the police; Hughes deems there must be a link. Unlike the police, she has a way of testing the theory. Both charred women used a Tinder-style app to hook up with men. Singleton Hughes leaps into the world of internet dating with a view to tracking down the sleazebag who is also handy with matches.
Jocasta’s life is, like most of ours, busy and crowded and unpredictable. All the while Jocasta needs to retain her sanity and tend to the needs of her living patients. Oh, and there are the unsupportive colleagues and her father’s mid-life crisis that Jocasta’s mother fails to sympathize with. Somehow, Denman weaves the mundane in with the unusual spate of killings in a way that comes together naturally. This skill makes for a lively read that keeps the reader on their toes, with the killer not exposed until the very end.
Dr. Hughes is a likable and flawed series hero who admits her standards in choosing a mate are high, if not always judicious. Her naïve streak might surprise some readers but it works well as a plot device that has Hughes occasionally leaps, before fully looking at what is in front of her.
We naturally wish good things for the good doctor. But we also wish her more Hastings-set murders so as to do the detecting with her. The Hughes series is off to a good start and I, for one, look forward to more of Jocasta’s adventures in life and love and murder.
