A Tapping at My Door: A gripping serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series)

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Cody was previously an undercover officer but it is clear that a previous case has gone horribly wrong and has caused him extreme trauma. I am not one to worry about 'female' characters but I have to say I agree with other reviewers on this score that both our hero's boss and the new constable (his ex girlfriend) are ace.

And that is one of the main reasons that this series will work well-we are made to really care about this fictional policeman! I really enjoyed the story, it was well paced and cleverly structured with the twists and turns that you would expect in a crime thriller. I appreciate that the backstory for the book's antagonist is a real-life event, but, firstly - few people outside of a specific UK town care or know of that event, and secondly, Chernobyl and the Armenian Genocide were also real-life tragedies, but you don't see them often mentioned in crime drama. It’s obvious that something had gone wrong whilst he was working undercover, which had affected him very badly. It so doesn't work when you read it that the author skips the whole episode and just says it's happened, because no powers of writing could make the scenes work.

Scared, she opens the door to find a large raven and then things get seriously creepy as she realises the raven is not alone…. The mystery begins as Terri Latham is disturbed late one night by a ‘tapping, scratching, scrabbling noise at her back door’.

This was also very well done with its helpful explanation of the difference between the new touristy bits and those slightly rougher parts of town cleverly slipped into the story to give a sense of place and to me this felt distinct from any generic English city. Less successful for me initially (there was a slight look to the heavens) was the slightly awkward scenario of him being partnered up with a former lover, but my fears were assuaged as DC Megan Webley established herself quickly as acutely necessary to the unfolding of Cody’s story. Jonathan Keeble is an experienced narrator and does his best with this drivel, but somehow his efforts just add an extra layer of ridiculousness to the proceedings. Running between Kensington and Fairfield is Sheil Road, close to another house I lived in, and the location for another murder in the novel.A Tapping at my Door is a fantastic start to this new series and I hope we don’t have too long to wait before the next instalment (I am so impatient-every authors nightmare!

Intelligently plotted and very well written, DS Nathan Cody, DC Megan Webley and their boss, DCI Stella Blunt, could easily establish themselves as one of my favorite police procedural teams.

If you're not really good at that sort of suspense-building, better to just tell me once and move the action forward. I don't think it's wise to compare one author to another because in the end, it's a matter of taste and personal preference which one you prefer; however, right on the front cover of this book, there's an excerpt from a review by the Guardian.

There are more bodies, each accompanied by a dead bird and a cyptic note, and it is soon obvious that the murderer is targeting the police.I have never read any novels by David Jackson before but, having read this, I am sure that I will be exploring his previous books. Despite the obvious trauma that he has gone through, trauma that is at first held back from the reader but slowly revealed as the story progresses, he is actually quite a humorous character in places with a similar sense of humour and outlook on life as myself.