Title: The Bisley Wood Murders (Detective ROb Miller #3)
Author: Biba Pearce
Published on: 21 June 2021
Genre: Mystery and Thrillers | Police Procedural
The Bisley Wood Murders is the third book in Biba Pearce‘s Detective Rob Miller series.
A ten-year-old girl goes missing on her way to school. Little Katie and her friend Candy always went to school together. But on this fateful day, only Candy reached school. Katie’s mother receives a phone call from school, asking if Katie is unwell and won’t be able to attend classes. Katie’s mum informs the police and a search team is sent to Barnes, the county from which the little girl disappeared.
Acting Detective Chief Inspector Rob Miller is given Katie’s case. Katie’s parents are on the verge of a divorce and Katie’s mum is dating a builder. Rob and his sidekick DI Mallory wonder if the mother’s boyfriend had a role in the little girl’s disappearance.
I have been binge reading this series and it’s time to add Detective Rob Miller series to my list of favorites.
The Bisley Wood Murders is a tad different from the first two books of this series. While the first two books screamed gore and violence, the third hardly has any violent scenes. When little Katie went missing, the Putney police team did not expect it to be the work of a serial killer. As the investigation into the missing girl begins, the detective learn of a few more young girls who went missing from the same county.
Jo Maguire and Rob Miller worked two cases previously and the attraction between the two was quite obvious. Rob was married to Yvette previously but they never had a ‘happy married life’ and drifted apart soon. In this book, we are told it’s been quite some time since Jo and Rob started dating.
There’s a shocking twist related to the missing girl halfway through the story. I never saw this coming. The detectives start seeing the missing child’s case in a whole new angle. Jo Maguire’s sister Rachel went missing two decades ago. Her bag was found in a pond nearby. Twenty years later, Katie’s bag is found in a pond. Are the two cases related? Was Rachel the killer’s first victim?
As a third book in the series, I wanted to see some improvement in the lives of recurring characters (Jo and Rob included) – not just their careers but also personal lives. Yvette is no longer in Rob’s life and I don’t think he misses her – he has Jo now.
I liked the twist and the suspense but the thrill of ‘what happens next’ was a tad low. Not many gory details or violent scenes though. (Quite a change from the previous two books.) I also have to comment on the usage of swear words. I am not against it but I don’t think I saw Rob using f-words in the first two books. I wonder what changed now…
If you love gripping police procedurals with a mind-blowing twist, you might want to add The Bisley Wood Murders by Biba Pearce to your TBR.
The Book Decoder 