Clemens Schoonderwoert's Reviews > Sycamore Gap

**Read 4.5 STARS!**

I like to begin this review by saying that this amazing crime mystery is the 2nd volume of the outstanding "DCI Ryan" series.

Once again this mystery has a historical centrepiece and that's Sycamore Gap within Hadrian's Wall, and that historical site will be the criminal backdrop of this great crime novel.

Superb storytelling by the author and great characters make this remarkable crime mystery a great read, while the historical surroundings of Sycamore Gap and the feel of places like Newcastle and Durham come also very much to the fore.

This story is set around the Summer Solstice of 2015, and it all starts off when a body is found inside Hadrian's Wall at Sycamore Gap by a man named Colin Hart, and its that of Amy Llewellyn who disappeared ten years ago, around the Summer Solstice of 2005.

Not long after this body is excavated, another young woman, Claire Burns, is murdered and found in that same spot within Hadrian's Wall, and so for DCI Ryan and his great team to find the culprit of the killings of these two young women.

During the investigation an old lethal acquaintance of DCI Ryan, a killer named Keir Edwards, the murderer of Ryan's sister Natalie and others, will come to the forefront as the Lord of Prison at HMP Frankland, by bending and making the rules and steer people on the outside to do his bidding, and at the same time the Master of undetected murders is longing for his next kill, while the Circle and especially its High Priest is making a serious demand from a certain high ranking official to do his bidding also.

What is to follow is a marvellous and intriguing crime mystery, with four threads in my opinion, the two murders themselves, the manipulation by Edwards to a certain individual, the calculated actions by the so far unknown killer of young women, and the pagan Circle that is killing people because of their ritual beliefs in human sacrifice, and all these factors are superbly interwoven and brought to us in a most fascinating fashion by the author.

Highly recommended, for this is a wonderful addition to this very promising series, and that's why I like to call this second episode: "An Absolute Compelling Sequel"!