Sunday, 6 April 2025

Book ~ "Down the Darkest Street" (2016) Alex Segura

From Goodreads ~ Pete Fernandez should be dead. His life - professional and personal - is in ruins. His best friend is dead. His newspaper career is past tense. His ex is staying with him as her own marriage crumbles. On top of that, the former journalist finds himself in the eye of a dangerous storm; investigating a missing girl with an unexpected partner and inching closer and closer to a vicious, calculating killer cutting a swath of blood across Miami - while at the same time battling his own personal demons that refuse to be silenced. 

Last year Pete wasn't happy working at a newspaper in Miami and ultimately got fired. With no job prospects, he tried working as a freelance private detective and is now working parttime in a friend's quiet bookstore. His personal life hasn’t been much better. Emily, the love of his life, left him a few years ago and married someone else. Now that marriage is falling apart and she’s moving in with Pete for a while, which is messing with his head and heart. Pete had been drinking heavily but a few months ago he realized he had to stop and started attending AA meetings.

When Alice, a former client from his brief PI days, goes missing, Pete can’t resist looking into it. Things get even more complicated when he discovers Emily’s marriage ended because her husband was having an affair with Alice. As more women begin to disappear, Pete teams up with Kathy, an ex-colleague from the newspaper, and the two of them find themselves getting pulled into the investigations. The FBI agents are giving them a hard time and telling them to stay out of it but, of course, they don't.

This is the second in the Pete Fernandez series (I read the first one in the series last week) and though I found the whodunnit a bit convoluted, I liked it. It is written in third person perspective with the focus on Pete and the serial killer. There is a lot of violence ... it seems like Pete is getting beat up badly often but bounces back quickly. As a head's up, there is a lot of swearing.

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