All the usual team are here at Cardiff Bay Police Station - DS Elan Jenkins happily in a relationship with forensic pathologist Dr Cara Frost, DC Ffion Morgan and DC Owain “Ginge" Evans. With his knee shattered and best mate Denny Cartwright shot dead Reece’s nemesis, the ruthless Billy Creed, was still running his gangland empire from the Midnight Club but he knew his injury made him vulnerable. The story overlaps with the end of book 3 where Arvel Baines and Billy Creed jointly met their ends. We now see them at their last meeting just before their deaths which was witnessed by someone who learns about the journal kept by Creed listing out details of all the corrupt officers in South Wales Police that he had employed. That particular someone, rookie reporter for the Herald Archie Ives, was hoping to use the information to further his career and match the success of old hand Maggie Kavanagh, and two weeks later he narrowly escaped death in a case of mistaken identity which has sent DCI Bran Reece and his team off on a wild goose chase looking for the killer who calmly executed a recently released paedophile on a Cardiff bus. Billy Creed was worried about a potential hit on him – and now his journal is missing. Archie is on the run, and Billy’s sister, the ruthless Marma Creed, is back home and wasting no time in taking over his empire. Archie knows someone else must have the journal and as the body count rises, it becomes obvious to Reece that someone named in it is prepared to go to extreme lengths to keep the incriminating evidence a secret. Will they succeed or will Reece expose a web of corruption going back years and catch the killer?
This has been one of my absolute favourites series since the very first book was originally published and I can certainly recommend every story where the reader will learn the full background on the wonderful array of characters they contain. The detectives form a really tight knit and loyal team and although Reece drives Chief Supt Alyson Cable to despair at times, she always shows her support for him when it is needed. Still haunted by his wife’s death, it is good to see Reece starting to cope a little better. There is a new and extremely loveable addition in the form of Redlar and it was great to see more of Reece’s long suffering best friend Yanto again. Building on the history of the series, it’s another excellent story, full of great settings, very likeable characters and a clever twisty plot which I can highly recommend. 5*