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5/5 Stars!

A psychologist who works with New Scotland Yard profiling serial killers, Greg Adams has figured out the pattern of the latest spree serial killer, The Divine, and rushes with law enforcement to stop the man from killing his next victim. However, only moments after seeing the psychopath led away in handcuffs, Greg’s world is upended when he learns his wife, Kate, was just murdered by another serial killer known as The Dreamer.

The hunt for The Dreamer goes nowhere. Burdened with grief and guilt, Greg walks away from his job. At the end of his sanity, he opts to take his life with a cruel game of Russian Roulette… that is interrupted by a frantic phone call telling him Kate wasn’t killed by The Dreamer a year earlier because he was already dead.

Despite knowing he’s too close to the case… and too close to the edge of his sanity, Greg is allowed back on the job to pursue the case. The info the mysterious caller gives him ignites his coldfire—his ability to get inside a serial killer’s head—and become the killer.

However, before this read is anywhere near the end, Greg Adams will be arrested for serial murder, locked up in a mental hospital, come face to face with true evil… and his own mortality.

I loved the plot and foreshadowing of The Dead Tell Lies and could barely catch my breath at the constant twists thrown in my path. But, it is the well-written characters that kept me turning pages!

Greg is a sympathetic character, but not for the obvious reason… the death of his wife. He’s smart and good at his job. Sometimes too good, and it takes him to some dark places few can go and return sane. He must revisit the crimes and lives of the six killers he helped capture to keep any more lives from being lost. Including his own.

DCIs Donaldson, Finch, and Matthews are more than just supporting players who seem unlikable in the beginning. Convinced of Greg’s innocence, they’re each put through their paces, risking their jobs and their lives to solve the case.

Having read and enjoyed J.F. Kirwan’s last suspense series, I had high expectations for The Dead Tell Lies, and it met… and surpassed them all.

Enjoy!

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Greg Adams, a criminal psychologist at Scotland Yard, specialises in bringing serial killers to justice. He tracks down a spree serial killer nicknamed the Divine, who has already killed six teenage girls and is about to kill a seventh. Greg works out the location where he is hiding and joins a raid. The police capture the Divine and save the girl, but on the very same night, Greg’s wife is brutally murdered by another serial killer, known as the Dreamer.

A year later, unable to bring the killer to justice, Greg has quit his job and is ready to end it all, when he receives a phone call from a man who tells him the Dreamer is dead, and that he didn’t kill Greg’s wife, Kate.

Greg returns to Scotland Yard to work for Superintendent Chief Detective Donaldson in the hope he can re-examine the case with the help of two new detectives, Finch and Matthews.

As Greg delves into the case further, he becomes more convinced that the Dreamer wasn’t the man responsible for his wife’s murder.

But if it wasn’t the Dreamer, who was it?

In order to solve the mystery around his wife’s murder, Greg is going to have to delve even deeper into the mind of a terrifying psychopath. And this time he might not make it back in one piece…