New Book - Fatal Witness - DCI Erika Foster 7 - by Robert Bryndza (Pages 1 - 56)

 First Published: 2022

This is a new novel in a series that I love. 

The book opens with a terrible scene. A woman opens the door and an angry man pushes and attacks her. The woman ends up gagged and with her hands tied, lying on the sofa bed. The man who attacked her is on the computer, trying to find something. When the woman realises that her legs are not tied, she manages to slide off the sofa and crawl to the kitchen, and grab a knife. Her attacker notices her absence, and he manages to take the knife from her. He drags her back to the sofa bed, and rolls her up inside and stabs her.

Erika has bought a house in Blackheath, a house that needs too much work, and she is now regretting moving there before doing some repairs. As she doesn't have food in the house, she goes to the chippie shop. When she is on her way back, she hears a terrible scream. Erika rushes to the building where the scream came from, and a woman opens the door to her. Her name is Tess, and she says that her sister is dead. When Erika enters the flat, she sees the woman dead, covered in blood, and she calls back up and the pathologist.

When Kate and Peterson arrive as well as some other constables, they are outside the flat when a neighbour happens to come out of his flat with a rubbish bag. The man gets nervous, refusing to open the bag and he gets injured when he tries to escape. The man, Charles Wakefield, is eventually arrested, and Erika and her team open the bag to reveal its contents. The stench is horrible. There are some ten air fresheners, and two or three decapitated cats, and Erika notices that their bodies are frozen.

After securing the scene and talking to Tess, Erika learns that the dead woman was called Vicky, and she lived in the flat, which belongs to Tess and her husband, who own a restaurant. Tess says that her sister was an actress, but since she had little luck in the field, she worked for her, and now she had the idea of producing podcasts.

That night at home when Erika can't sleep, she decides to have a look at Vicky's podcasts, and she discovers that they were about unsolved crimes. One of them draws her attention as it is about a case of dozens of cats being decapitated in London. Now Erika has a further motive to question Wakefield. 

I love this series and it has been a while since I last read the last novel. I am excited to have a new Erika Foster mystery.