Spoilers Ahead: 

The third and final book in the West County series, and I must say, I had such a brilliant time reading the other two books that this one was a minor let-down. 

We follow Dan Helier - yay! - as he gets another crime to solve - this man simply can’t catch a break! There is a fire, in which someone has been burned. In the beginning, they wonder whether maybe it was just a drunk party of teens, and it was an accident, however, evidence soon rises that makes them believe that it’s all part of a cult, and the people being burnt are sacrifices. 

Another one is burnt, so they decide to look for patterns, and they find someone who may be the third victim. So far, they’ve managed to deduce that there is a group of them, and everything is meticulously planned out. They realise it must be a university student, someone studying cults, and luckily, nearby, there is a university who teaches just that. 

They track down the supposed next victim, and then they realise it’s actually someone else, so they run off to find him. They realise the reasoner these murders is vengeance, as the their third victim was part of a team that got someone’s family killed. So, when the third victim (years ago) had a daughter and had to change names after an attack on his own family, the murderer told his daughter - who had been put in a different family than her father, whom she was told to be dead - that the man, who’s actually her dad, killed her family, and that he needed to die also. 

There was this big operation, and then MI5 got involved (what the point of that was, I still don’t know, it’s all very confusing to me) and then they find where the third fire is being built. They intercept the murderers, and stopped the murder from happening, and then everything got taken over by MI5, so the rest of the investigation remains unsolved. 

The ending was so abrupt - and so confusing! We didn’t find out what had happened to them, they were just palmed off onto another squad and we never saw them again! I get that that sometimes happens in police investigations, and there is not much you can do about it, but come on! A little side-note or something would have been nice! It feels like it was the easiest ending to take out, and, as a reader, I feel a little cheated. Very disappointing compared to Steadman’s other books. There just feels like a lot of loose ends. Like Dan’s sister? What happened to her, did she do well? Did he forgive her? Is their relationship fixed? Did he finally ask Claire to marry him? Did Sally lose the weight she wanted, and did she have Adam out for bringing in the cakes after they were banned? What happened to my darling angel, Lizzie? Did Mary and Michael meet again? I need answers! It doesn’t feel like the end of a series. It would have a higher rating if I knew there were answers to these questions, but I don’t think there’s another book planned - to my knowledge. Very disappointed. 

This book felt a little less personal… I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just that when you’re a writer, you know when someone’s work doesn’t have heart and passion, and this felt like one of those cases. Even the characters, that I adored in the fort two books, weren’t written as passionately as they were previously. Don’t even get me started on Claire. It infuriates me when people get involved in things that aren’t their business, so why did she start telling Dan how to be with his family? He’s a better person than me, because I’d have dumped her and never spoken to her again. The fact she was telling him what to do, like she’s Virgin Mary or something, grated on me a lot. Even Sally, expecting everyone to not eat cakes just because she’d put on weight, really did my head in. Unfortunately, I thought this book was a rather drab and confusing way to end a series, and I’m quite disappointed - the first two books are very good however, they set the standards extremely high for this book, so I would definitely still recommend reading it.