Playing With Bones
Book 2 in the DI Joe Plantagenet crime series
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4.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
On a grey October morning, the strangled body of a teenager is found in the North Yorkshire city of Eborby, a mutilated doll lying by her side.
Singmass Close, where the girl is found, has a famously sinister past. Reputedly haunted by the ghosts of children, it was the hunting ground of the Doll Strangler, a ruthless killer of the 1950s who was never brought to justice.
With the recent disappearance of another young female and an escaped convict at large, this horrific murder stretches Detective Inspector Joe Plantagenet's team to the limit. Is a copycat killer on the loose, or could the Doll Strangler really be back?
As the bodies start mounting up and Joe's questioning brings him closer to the real strangler, he comes to suspect a shockingly creepy connection between all three cases . . .
Praise for Kate Ellis . . .
'A beguiling author' The Times
'Clever plotting hides a powerful story of loss, malice and deception' Ann Cleeves
'Haunting' Independent
'The chilling plot will keep you spooked and thrilled to the end' Closer
'Unputdownable' Bookseller
'A fine storyteller' Peterborough Evening Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ellis's run-of-the-mill second procedural to feature North Yorkshire Det. Insp. Joe Plantaganet (after 2009's Seeking the Dead), Plantagenet, who carries with him the de rigueur tragic backstory (i.e., the loss of his wife in an accident, the murder of his partner), looks into a potentially explosive case the strangulation of a young woman, eventually identified as Natalie Parkes, whose left big toe was severed postmortem. Beside her corpse was a porcelain doll, mutilated in the same fashion. Incredibly, the police only learn of similar murders in the 1950s committed by a killer nicknamed the Doll Strangler of Singmass Close, who was never apprehended, by reading a true-crime book. A subplot concerning a na ve would-be model who finds herself abducted and forced to care for an ailing elderly woman provides a clumsy link to the police investigation. The solution to Parkes's murder will strike many as coming out of left field.
