Taryn's Reviews > Broken Places

Recent events have put me in the perfect frame of mind for an angry female character, and Cass Raines is the angriest I’ve seen since Lisbeth Salander. Cass is filled with a righteous, simmering rage and will not be stopped—by criminals or cops—until she closes her case. A former police officer, now a PI, Cass is stunned when she finds the body of her beloved father figure and mentor, Father Ray, shot dead in his own church, a dead gangbanger sprawled nearby. The lead detective on the case is a self-aggrandizing blowhard that Cass knows all too well from her time on the force, and he’s quick to assume it’s an open and shut murder/suicide, but Cass is convinced there’s no way that’s how things went down. She takes it upon herself to investigate, despite warnings to stay away from the case. She loved Father Ray and can’t let his killer go free.

A note on the audio version: Shari Peele is a good narrator, but the recording is marred by many soft palate/swallowing noises. (I’ve never listened to an audio book that wasn’t carefully edited to remove such sounds—can’t believe they made it into the final version, frankly. Some pauses were so distracting, I expected Peele to clear her throat and say “Excuse me” before moving on with her reading.) If you turn the volume down, they’re less noticeable, and I was able to put my annoyance aside because the book was so good, but if mouth noises make you murderous, you might want to grab this one in print.