Flawed
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"You can waste a lot of time looking . . . or you can pay me to find it for you." So goes the slogan of Brodie Farrell's one-woman detective agency. Although Brodie has made some surprising---and dangerous---discoveries while working as a modern-day treasure hunter, none of them has turned her life upside down in quite the way that her unexpected pregnancy does.
The timing is particularly awkward because Brodie has recently separated from her partner, the prickly Detective Superintendent Jack Deacon. To complicate matters further, Detective Inspector Alix Hyde has set her sights on Deacon while simultaneously trailing a mysterious criminal---and one-time friend of Deacon's---Terry Walsh, who has a habit of springing surprises of his own.
As ever, Brodie's best friend, Daniel Hood, will do anything to help her---even taking a leave from his beloved teaching job so that he can look after her business while she takes care of the baby. But soon Daniel is preoccupied with the well-being of young Noah Selkirk, who seems to be collecting more bruises than is reasonable even for a twelve-year-old boy, and is strangely linked to the Walsh case as well. . . .
As their entanglements weave together in complex patterns, all of the parties have to face the consequences of their own mistakes. But it's the flaws that make all of us human---and perhaps that ultimately make us stronger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Bannister's emotionally weighty seventh Brodie Farrell mystery (after 2006's Requiem for a Dealer), Farrell panics when her unexpected pregnancy threatens the continued success of her business Looking for Something? an eclectic problem-solving agency in Dimmock, England. One of her paramours, mathematics teacher Daniel Hood, delays his return to the classroom to serve as her assistant and eventual caretaker of the company. When a former student happens by, Hood soon determines that the boy is being beaten at home and quickly identifies his father, affluent and powerful attorney Adam Selkirk, as the guilty party. The bulk of the plot centers on Hood's amateurish efforts to intervene in the dysfunctional Selkirk family and Farrell's conflicted attitude toward the men in her life. Readers will be most satisfied if they approach this as a novel that happens to involve a criminal investigation, an impression enhanced by Bannister's quiet prose style and emphasis on relationships.