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Sophie Anderson #6
Coming Home
Coming Home is both a stand-alone novella and book 6 in the Sophie Anderson series. The first five novels have been published to international acclaim in 13 countries.
Coming Home sees Aussie FBI profiler Sophie Anderson return to Australia to solve her brother's thirty-year-old homicide.
When Sophie gets a call at 3am from her parents, she knows something is up. But nothing can prepare her for the bombshell...a boy has been found murdered in almost the exact circumstances as her brother, his body dumped metres from the original crime scene.
Sophie flies home to investigate the new murder with the hope of also solving her brother's cold case. However the emotional pressure cranks up a notch when another young boy goes missing.
Sophie must find the killer before this innocent boy meets the same fate as her brother.
Coming Home sees Aussie FBI profiler Sophie Anderson return to Australia to solve her brother's thirty-year-old homicide.
When Sophie gets a call at 3am from her parents, she knows something is up. But nothing can prepare her for the bombshell...a boy has been found murdered in almost the exact circumstances as her brother, his body dumped metres from the original crime scene.
Sophie flies home to investigate the new murder with the hope of also solving her brother's cold case. However the emotional pressure cranks up a notch when another young boy goes missing.
Sophie must find the killer before this innocent boy meets the same fate as her brother.
164 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 16, 2010
29 people are currently reading
341 people want to read
About the author
P.D. Martin
19 books137 followersP.D. Martin--Phillipa Deanne Martin--was born in Melbourne, Australia, and developed a passion for crime fiction and storytelling at an early age. This interest was backed up with formal education through a bachelor of behavioral sciences (with majors in psychology and criminology) and a postgraduate certificate in professional writing (creative writing).
Phillipa also writes children's and young adult fiction under Pippa Dee.
Follow this author on Facebook - www.facebook.com/pdmartinauthor
www.facebook.com/PippaDeeAuthor
Phillipa also writes children's and young adult fiction under Pippa Dee.
Follow this author on Facebook - www.facebook.com/pdmartinauthor
www.facebook.com/PippaDeeAuthor
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 15, 2013
Australian FBI profiler, Sophie Anderson, working in the US for the past three years was woken by a phone call from her Mum at 3am. Never expecting good news with a call at that hour, and learning her Dad was alright as well, Sophie was shocked to learn the pedophile who had murdered her brother when he was eleven and she was eight, thirty years ago, appeared to have re-surfaced in rural Victoria.
She immediately packed, booked her flight to Australia and went into work to speak to her boss, plus prepare her cases to be passed on to others. Leaving a message for her boyfriend, Darren, who was also a policeman, she hoped he’d call her back before she left the country that evening. On arrival in Melbourne, the jet-lag was fierce, but travelling to her family home with her parents was a comfort. She immediately contacted a friend in the Victorian Police force, as well as their profiler, and integrated herself, unofficially, into the investigation.
As she and Lily began to profile all past and present victims, some anomalies soon appeared. The profile on the murderer gave them a few more answers, but the brief and vivid images which hit Sophie left her gasping. With the arrival of Darren into Australia to support her and her parents, she realized she must do more. Darren was the only one who knew of her “gift”, but her mother had guessed it as well.
As events picked up the pace, the clock began ticking when another young boy vanished. Sophie needed to find the killer before the same fate befell this child as had befallen her brother. The emotion was high, the pressure great; would they succeed where they had failed thirty years ago?
Another thoroughly enjoyable suspense thriller from the talented Aussie author, PD Martin. I love her work, and highly recommend her books to all.
She immediately packed, booked her flight to Australia and went into work to speak to her boss, plus prepare her cases to be passed on to others. Leaving a message for her boyfriend, Darren, who was also a policeman, she hoped he’d call her back before she left the country that evening. On arrival in Melbourne, the jet-lag was fierce, but travelling to her family home with her parents was a comfort. She immediately contacted a friend in the Victorian Police force, as well as their profiler, and integrated herself, unofficially, into the investigation.
As she and Lily began to profile all past and present victims, some anomalies soon appeared. The profile on the murderer gave them a few more answers, but the brief and vivid images which hit Sophie left her gasping. With the arrival of Darren into Australia to support her and her parents, she realized she must do more. Darren was the only one who knew of her “gift”, but her mother had guessed it as well.
As events picked up the pace, the clock began ticking when another young boy vanished. Sophie needed to find the killer before the same fate befell this child as had befallen her brother. The emotion was high, the pressure great; would they succeed where they had failed thirty years ago?
Another thoroughly enjoyable suspense thriller from the talented Aussie author, PD Martin. I love her work, and highly recommend her books to all.
June 6, 2024
This was a great way to wrap up the story of Sophie Anderson with a personal case of her own. A story that we heard since her first book, the case of her murdered brother. A case that was never solved and a memory that haunts her. When a body is found back home, killed in the same manner as her brother. She must face that her brother's killer has returned. She returns home to seek answers for not only herself, her parents, her brother...
I truly enjoyed the twists that this book had, it really kept me guessing throughout. I believe this author is very creative, dynamic, and keeps you on your toes with her story telling. I could not have guessed the ending but I truly enjoyed it. If you want to be kept guessing and be captivated by a story from the start, then this is a good book for you.
I truly enjoyed the twists that this book had, it really kept me guessing throughout. I believe this author is very creative, dynamic, and keeps you on your toes with her story telling. I could not have guessed the ending but I truly enjoyed it. If you want to be kept guessing and be captivated by a story from the start, then this is a good book for you.
March 31, 2022
I loved every single book in this series, and it's nice to give it a "wrapped up" ending, particularly as it didn't feel trite or overdone, but really brought everything back around nicely. I think Sophie is an excellent main character, and I enjoyed having more of her parents in this story to get a better sense of her as a person. My favorite part of this story was the suspense and surprise up until the very last page. Definitely recommend this full series!
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October 11, 2011For thirty years FBI profiler Sophie Anderson thought her brother’s case was one of the ones that was going to go unsolved forever.
Just a young girl when her slightly older brother was kidnapped and murdered, the event left a deep impression on Sophie which drove her into law enforcement. She worked her way up through the ranks of the Victoria Police department in her home country of Australia, eventually making it to a position in Homicide.
Her college background in psychology, and dual citizenship because of her father’s status as an American, got Sophie’s foot in the door where she really wanted to be: criminal profiling with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Little could she have imagined that after years of profiling kidnappers, rapists, and murders she would actually be called upon to put her skills to use in a case that hit far too close to home.
Yet, that’s exactly where she finds herself when a call from her parents back in Australia informs Sophie that the police have found the body of a young boy murdered in a virtually identical manner as her brother was, dumped within a stone’s throw of the remote location where her brother’s body was found all those years ago. Now, on leave from her position with the FBI, Sophie heads back home to Australia in hopes that solving this modern day nightmare will help put to rest the demons from her past.
While the main tension in Coming Home is provided by the police hunt for the killer – tension which is ratcheted up significantly when another boy goes missing during the course of their investigation – there is another layer of tension simultaneously unfolding within Sophie herself. The deeper she gets into the current investigation, the deeper she must also go into her thoughts and feelings about her brother’s murder. It’s a place that holds tremendous guilt for her because in the week leading up to her brother’s kidnapping Sophie had nightmares in which she saw him being abducted. Though she was only a child at the time and it’s unlikely anyone would have taken her nightmares to be anything more than just that, Sophie has carried around a feeling of guilt for 30 years wondering what might have happened if she’d told someone. Now, driven by the dual desires to save the boy currently missing as well as to find justice for her brother, Sophie is willing to do whatever it takes to makes sure this killer is stopped.
Author PD Martin does a great job of working the inner turmoil Sophie is experiencing into the bigger plot. Though she desperately wants to be treated as a professional colleague and kept in the loop of the investigation, Sophie continuously struggles to maintain the emotional distance needed to be a truly effective profiler in a case that has the potential to solve her brother’s murder as well. Her raging desire for revenge comes dangerously close to compromising her judgment, constantly threatening to get the better of her. Yet she isn’t blinded by her emotions, and struggles throughout to keep her professional focus. Neither emotional basket case nor ice cold revenge machine, Sophie is presented in a tremendously believable fashion, and it was nice to read a book that managed to treat the protagonist as a three-dimensional person. Indeed, Coming Home is one of those rare thrillers that manages to deliver on both the action and the character development.
Though Coming Home is technically the sixth book in the Sophie Anderson series, it was written in such a manner that it can be read as a standalone, so even if you’ve never read any of the previous books in the series don’t let that keep you from jumping in here.
Just a young girl when her slightly older brother was kidnapped and murdered, the event left a deep impression on Sophie which drove her into law enforcement. She worked her way up through the ranks of the Victoria Police department in her home country of Australia, eventually making it to a position in Homicide.
Her college background in psychology, and dual citizenship because of her father’s status as an American, got Sophie’s foot in the door where she really wanted to be: criminal profiling with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Little could she have imagined that after years of profiling kidnappers, rapists, and murders she would actually be called upon to put her skills to use in a case that hit far too close to home.
Yet, that’s exactly where she finds herself when a call from her parents back in Australia informs Sophie that the police have found the body of a young boy murdered in a virtually identical manner as her brother was, dumped within a stone’s throw of the remote location where her brother’s body was found all those years ago. Now, on leave from her position with the FBI, Sophie heads back home to Australia in hopes that solving this modern day nightmare will help put to rest the demons from her past.
While the main tension in Coming Home is provided by the police hunt for the killer – tension which is ratcheted up significantly when another boy goes missing during the course of their investigation – there is another layer of tension simultaneously unfolding within Sophie herself. The deeper she gets into the current investigation, the deeper she must also go into her thoughts and feelings about her brother’s murder. It’s a place that holds tremendous guilt for her because in the week leading up to her brother’s kidnapping Sophie had nightmares in which she saw him being abducted. Though she was only a child at the time and it’s unlikely anyone would have taken her nightmares to be anything more than just that, Sophie has carried around a feeling of guilt for 30 years wondering what might have happened if she’d told someone. Now, driven by the dual desires to save the boy currently missing as well as to find justice for her brother, Sophie is willing to do whatever it takes to makes sure this killer is stopped.
Author PD Martin does a great job of working the inner turmoil Sophie is experiencing into the bigger plot. Though she desperately wants to be treated as a professional colleague and kept in the loop of the investigation, Sophie continuously struggles to maintain the emotional distance needed to be a truly effective profiler in a case that has the potential to solve her brother’s murder as well. Her raging desire for revenge comes dangerously close to compromising her judgment, constantly threatening to get the better of her. Yet she isn’t blinded by her emotions, and struggles throughout to keep her professional focus. Neither emotional basket case nor ice cold revenge machine, Sophie is presented in a tremendously believable fashion, and it was nice to read a book that managed to treat the protagonist as a three-dimensional person. Indeed, Coming Home is one of those rare thrillers that manages to deliver on both the action and the character development.
Though Coming Home is technically the sixth book in the Sophie Anderson series, it was written in such a manner that it can be read as a standalone, so even if you’ve never read any of the previous books in the series don’t let that keep you from jumping in here.
August 19, 2011
Synopsis: FBI profiler, Sophie Anderson, had thought her brother’s abduction and murder, when she was a young girl, would go unsolved forever. It was that murder which prompted her to join the police and work her way up to being a homicide detective in Australia’s Victoria Police department. But with only one profiler in the State of Victoria here career was blocked, with her eventually leaving Australia for the USA where, due to her dual nationality, she was able to join the FBI.
Calling in favours from old friends in the Police Department, she gets access to the crime scene files and, working along side her old colleague, Lily Murphy, develops a profile of the perpetrator who she helps track down.
Review:The tension builds as the story develops, in part due to a new victim being abducted and in part due to the mounting pressure the protagonist feels to solve her brother’s murder. Sophie’s psychic gifts cause her to have visions of what has happened to these victims, with this further adding to the tension. None of these scenes are particularly graphic, which can be a problem when describing child sexual abuse. Rather, the horror of what has happened, and is continuing to happen, to these children is brought home by focussing on the children’s and the parents’ emotional suffering; including Sophie’s own pain and that of her parents. The horror of these crimes is further emphasised by Sophie and Lily considering the perpetrators’ reasons for abducting, abusing and killing these children, while constructing their profile.
The characters are well-rounded, and believable, as are their motives. P D Martin is very effective in defining the characters through their patterns of speech and mannerisms. I particularly liked the fact that the protagonist, Sophie, doesn’t accept that she has dealt with her brother’s death in a maladaptive way, while all those around her are aware of this and attempt to bring it to her attention. This created a realistic sense that most people, including psychologists, struggle to avoid emotional pain even if they know, deep-down, that this isn’t a constructive way to deal with grief.
The only problem I had with the book was Sophie’s psychic ‘gift’. While this adds extra tension to the story, to a pragmatist like myself this required some suspension of disbelief. However, this was handled well by P D Martin who explored how Sophie, as a scientist, had herself found it difficult to believe this ‘gift’ was real.
Calling in favours from old friends in the Police Department, she gets access to the crime scene files and, working along side her old colleague, Lily Murphy, develops a profile of the perpetrator who she helps track down.
Review:The tension builds as the story develops, in part due to a new victim being abducted and in part due to the mounting pressure the protagonist feels to solve her brother’s murder. Sophie’s psychic gifts cause her to have visions of what has happened to these victims, with this further adding to the tension. None of these scenes are particularly graphic, which can be a problem when describing child sexual abuse. Rather, the horror of what has happened, and is continuing to happen, to these children is brought home by focussing on the children’s and the parents’ emotional suffering; including Sophie’s own pain and that of her parents. The horror of these crimes is further emphasised by Sophie and Lily considering the perpetrators’ reasons for abducting, abusing and killing these children, while constructing their profile.
The characters are well-rounded, and believable, as are their motives. P D Martin is very effective in defining the characters through their patterns of speech and mannerisms. I particularly liked the fact that the protagonist, Sophie, doesn’t accept that she has dealt with her brother’s death in a maladaptive way, while all those around her are aware of this and attempt to bring it to her attention. This created a realistic sense that most people, including psychologists, struggle to avoid emotional pain even if they know, deep-down, that this isn’t a constructive way to deal with grief.
The only problem I had with the book was Sophie’s psychic ‘gift’. While this adds extra tension to the story, to a pragmatist like myself this required some suspension of disbelief. However, this was handled well by P D Martin who explored how Sophie, as a scientist, had herself found it difficult to believe this ‘gift’ was real.
April 13, 2011
Thanks to her dual citizenship, Sophie Anderson has graduated from the Victoria Police in Australia to the FBI in the US. But a call from home brings her back to the motherland: a current serial killer case is linked to the death of Sophie's own brother years ago.
This novella starts off slow, with info-dumps regarding investigation procedures, the differences in US and Australian laws, Sophie's history, etc. But when Sophie and Victoria's only forensic psychologist draft a profile, the pace steps up and the story becomes a real thriller. The emotional depth is raw, and the setting in my own state (I'm most familiar with Eltham in this tale) brings the danger disturbingly close to home for Victorian readers. Coming Home is well worth reading.
This novella starts off slow, with info-dumps regarding investigation procedures, the differences in US and Australian laws, Sophie's history, etc. But when Sophie and Victoria's only forensic psychologist draft a profile, the pace steps up and the story becomes a real thriller. The emotional depth is raw, and the setting in my own state (I'm most familiar with Eltham in this tale) brings the danger disturbingly close to home for Victorian readers. Coming Home is well worth reading.
September 8, 2010
Really a great story about Sophie an FBI agent with a gift. This story really tells about Sophie and her family and the sorrow and guilt that Sophie has been living with. I feel like this story made Sophie a real person to me. I read this story before I read Kiss of Death and found it enhanced my enjoyment of the story.
Wonderfully written and very fast paced. It moved along and had me guessing up to the end.
Wonderfully written and very fast paced. It moved along and had me guessing up to the end.
April 22, 2012
Very solidly crafted mystery, interesting characters and a great sense of location. The plot moved well, everything fell in place consistently and I really did not see the ending coming.
I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read the prior books first, as this is several books down from the first and I'm sure I would have been more invested in the main characters.
I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read the prior books first, as this is several books down from the first and I'm sure I would have been more invested in the main characters.
March 16, 2011
This book was alright I think it would have been better had I had the time to set and read and not have to put it down
March 6, 2011
bril but very sad
July 21, 2011
Great book, read in parts. I loved how we, the readers could vote on what could happen next! It was great! And the fact that it was a free e-book didn't hurt, either :)
Want to read
January 15, 2012Started but had to stop when I realized the victims were young boys aged 9-12 - the same age as my son. Freaked me out, but I should be able to go back to it later.
Want to read
April 19, 2012$0.0
September 16, 2012
Easy read and fast paced. At times it seemed to repeat but overall I enjoyed it.
January 8, 2011
This book is quite detailed with facts. A good read
March 5, 2012
Fabulous story. Well paced, exciting thriller.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews