The Innocent Angels by Alison Belsham

The Innocent Angels (Detective Lexi Bennett, #3)

by Alison Belsham

A body in a cave. A family full of secrets. And time running out before the killer strikes again…

The case is one of the strangest Detective Lexi Bennett has ever seen. In a cave beneath a vineyard, ayoung woman wearing angel wings lies dead, her baby daughter crawling nearby.

Among the green vines and the rolling hills, Lexi finds no shortage of motives. The owner of the vineyard claims to be the father of the victim’s child, and his wife was clearly furious with her rival.

But when another woman is found dead in angel wings, her baby abandoned beside her, Lexi is certain the killer is following a strange and personal ritual.

Under pressure to arrest the obvious suspect and out on a limb, Lexi ignores her boss and follows her gut, deep into the past. When she’s attacked, she knows she’s on the right track. But the killer already has his next victim in his sights… and Lexi will have to risk everything to stop him.

For fans of Angela Marsons, Karin Slaughter and Val McDermid, The Innocent Angels will keep you hooked from the first page to the final shocking reveal.

Reviewed by Jeff Sexton on

5 of 5 stars

Share

Another (Mostly) Solid Entry In Series. This was a solid entry in the series for the most part, though perhaps it did have a touch of pacing issues. And yet I've struggled for nearly a week now to come up with words to put "on paper" about my experience with the book. Perhaps that is more on me though, as I really do think I'm reaching the limits of my own "hyper reading" abilities as new/ more pressing interests and needs come to bear in my life.

The book itself was intriguing in so many ways. The manner of murder, the placement, the investigation... and the personal, for the team. Specifically, I actually particularly enjoyed how an injury Lexi suffers at the beginning of the tale is worked throughout this story and isn't just some random detail to make her "more relatable" - although it certainly does, to anyone who has ever trained for and ran a half marathon themselves. (Though to be clear, I managed to run 2 of them - separated by several months - completely injury free, back in my own running days. But getting injured during training or racing is actually a very common thing that I simply managed to be lucky enough to avoid.)

There were enough callbacks to the earlier books here to link it in series without being a spoilerfest for those books, so readers new to the series actually *could* enter it here - but I still recommend going back to Book 1 and entering the series there. On the other end, there wasn't any real sense of continuation *needed* by the reader, so while I hope this series continues, it also wouldn't feel incomplete if it ended as a trilogy. Still, here's hoping we get many more books here, as I really do like the writing style and characterizations.

Very much recommended.

Last modified on

Reading updates

  • 9 November, 2023: Started reading
  • 10 November, 2023: Finished reading
  • 15 November, 2023: Reviewed