Today is my stop on the blog tour for Guilt By Michelle Kidd, this is the first book in the DI Nicki Hardcastle series and spoiler alert I already can’t wait for the second. A big thank you to Zoe from Zooloo’s Book Tours for inviting me along.

I have a lot of thoughts so let’s jump right in…

Guilt
Is a killer born…. or created?
A missing child.
A killer on the loose.
A past that refuses to die.
When a six-year-old boy disappears from a local fair, every parent’s worst nightmare is about to come true.
And for Detective Inspector Nicki Hardcastle, twenty-two years after her own nightmare began, the past she thought was buried starts catching up with her – and fast.
Leading the hunt for the missing child, Nicki soon finds the chase takes on a personal twist, with her own memories haunting her every move.
With time set against them, and a killer following his own chilling agenda, can Nicki and her team stop history from repeating itself?
Only time will tell.
But it’s time they don’t have.
–Goodreads–

You know that I’m always honest with my reviews and opinions here so I’m not afraid to admit that I had serious mixed feelings during the first third of this book as I didn’t read the whole synopsis, which I hold my hands up is completely my fault. I was just sold by the tagline “Is a killer born… or created?” turns out this is all I need to be interested in a book. So when I started reading about a 6 year old boy who is taken from a fair my heart stopped, I have a 5 year old boy and this is honestly my worst nightmare. I thought about abandoning the book but it’s extremely well written and I’d started to connect with our main character DI Nicki Hardcastle so I decided to continue.
It was definitely the right decision!

There are a lot of trigger warnings for this book as with most crime thrillers but especially those associated with children, there is violence and death of children mentioned but that does not happen on the page.

The author knows how to draw readers in and make them feel as if they know the characters. We get so much of DI Hardcastle’s backstory which really helped me feel and connect with her. I loved meeting her team and getting to know their personalities. They’re all so determined and are willing to put themselves in harms way if it means saving lives.

Even though this is an extremely difficult topic I think that the author dealt with it really well. It was just enough to hit you where it hurts but there wasn’t any graphic descriptions or any unnecessary scenes just for shock factor which I really appreciated.

I absolutely loved following the investigation, I couldn’t put this book down.
Throughout the case the concept of Guilt is brought up multiple times, showing that everyone we come across will have experienced guilt in some form throughout their life. The question of whether a killer is born or created is also brought up which is something I’ve been really interested in since I studied Criminal Justice at Uni.

I will definitely be reading the next book in this series.

–Grab Your Copy Here–

So Who is Michelle Kidd?

Michelle Kidd is a self-published author best known for the Detective Inspector Jack MacIntosh series of novels set in London. She has also recently begun a new series which is set in her home town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk – starring Detective Inspector Nicki Hardcastle.
Michelle qualified as a lawyer in the early 1990s and spent the best part of ten years practising civil and criminal litigation.
But the dream to write books was never far from her mind and in 2008 she began writing the manuscript that would become the first DI Jack MacIntosh novel – The Phoenix Project. The book took eighteen months to write, but spent the next eight years gathering dust underneath the bed.
In 2018 Michelle self-published The Phoenix Project and has not looked back since. There are currently four DI Jack MacIntosh novels, with a fifth in progress, and the first DI Nicki Hardcastle novel is due for release in August 2021. Michelle now works full time for the NHS and lives in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. She enjoys reading, wine and cats – not necessarily in that order.

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