Book Review: Cutting Blades

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

Cutting Blades     Amazon US HC Amazon UK PB Amazon Canada HC
Victoria Blake
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Woman Main Character   Private Investigator
Series: Samantha "Sam" Falconer # 2
Orion, $24.95 trade paperback, 328 pages

Sam Falconer’s year isn’t getting off to a very good start. London is frozen in a January blizzard, PI work is slow, and her father, a brutal ex-SAS soldier whom she thought dead for 28 years, has come back into her life. When Sam is hired to investigate the disappearance of a promising Oxford rower, she hopes that the case will take her mind off her troubles, as well as help pay the bills.

Harry Cameron, the young rower in question, simply didn’t turn up for the Boat Race trials after Christmas, even though he’d been very keen before the end of the term. The coach is worried, not just about the team and their chances in the prestigious race but about Harry himself. Sam soon finds herself caught up not only in the heady world of competitive rowing but in the dark underworld of antiques dealing.

Cutting Blades is Blake’s second Sam Falconer novel. The fact that it’s already being distributed on this side of the Atlantic says a great deal about her publishers’ faith in her skills and in the series. Most British authors have to wait through several books in a series before the Canadian and North American rights are sold.

Falconer is one of those strong yet flawed female protagonists that have been cropping up in crime fiction since the 1980s. They’ve been slower to appear in British crime fiction, perhaps because affirmative action hasn’t quite taken off in the British police system. I can count them on the fingers of one hand. If Victoria Blake keeps writing Sam Falconer novels, though, there might be a flood tide of new British female detectives.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM