Books: What Lies Buried By Margaret Kirk (2019)

Once again, I will note I happen to know the writers brother, so I’m still going to give my best review.

"Ten year-old Erin is missing; taken in broad daylight during a friend's birthday party. With no witnesses and no leads, DI Lukas Mahler races against time to find her. But is it already too late for Erin - and will her abductor stop at one stolen child? And the discovery of human remains on a construction site near Inverness confronts Mahler's team with a cold case from the 1940s. Was Aeneas Grant's murder linked to a nearby POW camp, or is there an even darker story to be uncovered? With his team stretched to the limit, Mahler's hunt for Erin's abductor takes him from Inverness to the Lake District. And decades-old family secrets link both cases in a shocking final twist."

What Lies Buried is the second Lukas Mahler story and is a gripping tale about an ugly, but very realistic subject of child abduction. There is also an additional sub-plots dealing with a 70 year-old murder and Mahler’s ongoing association with local crime boss Carl “Cazza” Mackay that gets a new wrinkle when it looks like someone is trying kill MacKay.

It’s a fast-paced story, and Kirk easily keeps all the threads of tale from unraveling –though I could do less with the Andy Black and his questionable tactics with his police work and his silly rivalry with Mahler.  While I understand the male ego, it’s very clear Andy’s moral compass is compromised and it irritates me that no one else see’s this. Maybe this is what cops do; ignore some of the other cops obvious flaws just because there is this “brotherhood” among them. And as clever as June Wallace, Mahler’s boss, I’m surprised how much she lets Black get away with. Sometimes I felt it made her a bit of a dim bulb. Also, I felt the whole issue with the Chief –Wallace’s boss- was too much Eastenders, to borrow a British soap opera title. Look, I understand that everyone wants things to be resolved nice and neat, and the press will hound police, but it all seems too predictable soap opera tropes.

This book also sets up the third yet-to-be-released third Lukas Mahler story, ending on a cliffhanger. This may explain why some story points are not resolved (unless I missed it), like why one of the girls who goes missing is later found dead. Why she died is never fully explained (though it’s later revealed that the girl’s disappearance is connected to events sometime prior), and there was no trauma on the girls body, so why was she murdered?

I liked the book, though and will look forward towards book three. But I do hope that Kirk winds down some of sub-plots (like who’s trying to destroy Cazza MacKay), as they do sometimes distract from the main plot.