WRONGFUL DEATH is the ninth book in the Anna Travis series from Lynda La I started to struggle with this series around book 4 (DEADLY INTENT), and.
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Anna Travis
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Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. The book is fast-paced, very detailed, suspenseful and exhausting to read. There are numerous characters, dead bodies, interconnecting relationships and events. Of course, the main characters are flawed - Anna Travis and James Langton. Anna has matured and is a top-notch, brilliant detective. Langton is a ticking time bomb - full of regrets, paralyzing pain from previous horrific injuries and a love-hate relationship with the human race.
I have enjoyed the Anna Travis mysteries very much, but this one is not my favorite. I know that the pattern for police procedurals is to go over the evidence again and again to tease apart what is important and what is not. But Deadly Intent went over the top in this regard.
I finally lost track of all the timelines--who did what and when--and was very happy to finally reach the end. Lynda LaPlante is too good a writer to produce what was ultimately a boring book. I enjoyed the book quite a lot. In the second half I thought the plot got confusing because there was a lot going on with many different characters bad guys.
Hence I found it a bit hard to keep track but it worked out in the end. I wonder if it is a requirement to be a Chief Inspector that you behave like a jerk and treat your underlings like dirt - Cunningham and Langton both fit this bill.
Anna Travis - Book Series In Order
I did think the bit at the end with Anna and Damien was interesting but superfluous. One person found this helpful. Like her previous book, this one was long, drawn out and convoluted. I am now wondering if I even want to try her next book, if this is the direction in which she is going. Just finished this book. It was a complicated plot and I had to really pay attention in order to follow everything. The police themselves were confused much of the time.
Anna is an intuitive detective but she does not play well with others. She's not a team player most of the time.
Deadly Intent
While the fact is that she is right much of the time, it does not sit well with her whenever everyone doesn't just fall in line with her thinking. If you want a complicated, tangled plot and a very flawed main character, this is the book for you! Another excellent Travis and Langton crime thriller. I am loathe to have this series end. La Plantes on the top of her game. Well worth the time to read this number one author. I loved the first three books in the Anna Travis series but I was very disappointed in this book. It was strictly a police procedural, and a very long and repetitive one at that.
The investigators interrogated many suspects several times, asking basically the same questions again, and then discussing those same answers, or speculating on new interpretations, over and over among themselves. I normally really like La Plante's work but I was very frustrated and annoyed by the repetitive and lengthy discourses in this book. She is a Detective and the books pick up when she is a trainee detective.
WRONGFUL DEATH - Lynda La Plante
She gets her first murder case in the first novel. She has to win over the respect of her male counterparts and takes a risk with a high risk suspect. In the second book, she is now a Detective Inspector and she is still working with her partner, James Langton. The TV show was called Above Suspicion, after her first novel.
This series was based on her first novel and it sees DC Anna Travis, who is still a trainee at this point, getting her first murder case. It is a cold case from eight years ago, with a new victim being found. With the new victim, Anna is able to find new evidence but the case is still very confusing because the type of victim has changed. Kelly Reilly was cast as Anna Travis and the series was broadcast in 3 parts over consecutive nights. The show was very successful and was picked up for a second series. Reilly reprised her role as Anna Travis and La Plante did the adaptations for the show herself.
In the series, Travis discovers there is a copycat killer on the loose who is copying the famous Black Dahlia case from California. The case begins with the discovery of a young girls body, which has been brutally mutilated. The second series was equally as successful and was broadcast in two parts. The third series was based on her fourth book, Deadly Intent. In this book, the team is called in to investigate the murder of a former police officer. The third series was still very well received by the networks but there was a dip in the ratings and it was beaten by some shows in BBC 1.
The show was renewed for a fourth season based on Silent Scream, and then it was cancelled. Backlash was the 8th novel in the Anna Travis series and was released in It was an instant hit and her fans are eagerly awaiting the next installment see below.
In this novel, James Langton is haunted by an unsolved case from 13 years ago in which a 13 year old girl disappeared from a street in London. The catch was that the street was very busy at the time, and it was in daytime, but no one saw anything. Reynolds died from a single gunshot wound to the head, the gun held in his right hand.
But details are emerging that suggest someone else may have fired the gun Which therefore requires a confession. On the downside it was a disappointment. Whilst the central premise, the re-investigation of the death of Josh Reynolds was an interesting idea, the cast of characters flat out didn't work for me. Can't remember the last time I've encountered so many characters that it was almost impossible to understand or connect with. In the earlier books I did finish, Anna Travis was a complicated and prickly character, but a dedicated investigator.
What on earth she was doing there, why she had to be so universally unpleasant, difficult, opinionated, escaped me completely. Unless she was there to be the token out of step foreigner? Still can't get it straight in my own mind. Then there's the rest of the office staff with the token over-worked, put upon one; the lazy, flittery one who never does anything but makes a lot of noise anyway, and the steady bloke in the background. Just a few too many caricatures. Not helped by the presence somewhere in the upper echelons of DCS James Langton which also seemed odd.
He seemed to bounce in, all in charge, and then bounce out all flustered by the higher up-upper echelons having it in for him. And then there was something about his marriage, and his past relationship with Travis, and then Not quite before Travis heads off to the US, gets into another relationship, solves the local problems and steams back to the UK all ready to pick up the Reynolds case and solve it in one big bound And therein lies the biggest problem with this book, it starts out as slow as treacle, with only the characters to engage interest.
The plot then heads off into somewhere-else land and when everything's righted there, our hero returns to the UK to save that day as well. Reading, as I do, rather a lot of crime fiction in a year, it's normally possible to find something positive. In the earlier books, even in the last one I finished, Travis was a good character who could lift a book's ranking, even one that has a flawed plot, or a lot of filler, or some daft red herrings. A motorway service station on the M1: Behind it, a body is found in a ditch, that of a girl barely out of her teens.
She appears to have no family, no friends, no connections anywhere. Other girls have gone missing in the vicinity and no one has stepped forward to claim them. I've been happily reading the Anna Travis series by Lynda La Plante since the first book and enjoying them.
Despite a few odds and ends that can be mildly annoying. Ongoing romantic angst, a tricky senior officer in this case the early on love interest as well , and some seriously big books without always having quite enough story to fill out all of the pages. Which is a pity. Because the investigative elements of this book are actually not too bad. It does take a while for things to get moving mind you - but it's an interesting sort of a case, with the bodies of two young unidentified girls and an identified older prostitute seemingly having little in common.