If anything ever happens to me, please ask DCI Liz Field to investigate.
The novel opens in the charred wreckage of a house fire, with the neighbours uprooted and the building on the verge of collapse. Early indications show it’s arson, and a woman lies in the wreckage, dead. Attempted rescuers are hospitalised. It’s devastating.
DCI Field arrives on the scene – kind, compassionate, competent. The victim is an older woman, less publicity friendly than another case going on at the moment, where a young woman working at a food bank has been shot dead on her doorstep. But Field wants justice done, and she works to get it by being as thorough as she can be given the difficult circumstances.
The arson victim is a known “nuisance caller” – everyone knows her name and her address, she’s put in hundreds of calls over the years, and given her mental health, no one took her seriously. And yet her exact fears came to life, and her life was ended.
The novel follows the investigation, not only into the crime, but into who Anne was, and follow Field’s quest for justice. It’s tense, gripping, and has to be read in one sitting. The writing keeps you hooked, and all the characters are treated with care and compassion.
While this is the second of Brennan’s Liz Field novels, it was the first that I’d read, and works so well as as a standalone, but I will be picking up the first novel as I really enjoyed this roller coaster ride!
BLURB
‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’
‘He’s trying to burn down my house. He’s going to kill me.
Anne Evans was a ‘nuisance caller’. She would repetitively dial 999 in desperate panic, screaming down the phone that ‘he’ was going to burn her alive…
But after years of false alarms, people stopped listening.
Now, as the smoke clears, DCI Liz Field can only watch helplessly as Anne’s charred home collapses, her body still trapped inside.
The blaze leaves scant evidence behind, but the more Field’s team uncover in the rubble, the more disturbing the case becomes. This wasn’t merely arson, it was murder, tailored to the victim’s worst nightmare.
Everyone thought Anne was just a paranoid recluse. But is it really paranoia, if all that you feared comes true?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hannah Brennan was born in and still lives in South East London, and studied English Literature at Durham University. She is one of the organisers at the Greenwich Writers writing group. Hannah is also a trustee at the Royal Association for Deaf People. Hannah has had OCD since her teenage years, although she is now happily in recovery. She has previously volunteered for and regularly attends groups at the charity OCD Action. No Safe Place was her debut novel.
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