Child’s Play

Child’s Play is the 4th in a series of books by Darcia Helle. If you’re new to the series, I think you can still enjoy the book without reading the others first because with each of her novels in this series, Helle has included enough background to enable the reader to understand the story without needing to have already met the characters. However, the first three books are excellent so I would definitely recommend you read them too.

Child’s Play is quite a dark novel, and I’ve come to expect this from Helle’s writing. She does always have just the right balance between dark and light as there’s a good dose of humour in all of her work. The subject for this work is perhaps one of the most disturbing as it involves child abduction, and child trafficking, abuse, and pornography. Helle’s character Sean is seen at his most brutal as he deals with the criminals in a way only he could do.

Helle has a talent for building suspense in her stories. This is most noticeable whenever Sean and Michael have caught a criminal and are about to set about trying to get answers. There is that expectation of violence, and there are some quite hard-hitting scenes, but somehow the author always stops short of allowing the violence to become gratuitous. It’s one of the things I admire about her writing.

In this story there is a lot of tension as we follow the characters who are trying to track down members of a paedophile ring.

When the character Kate is introduced, one of Nikki’s old friends, the story takes an interesting twist and becomes more fast-paced until the nail-biting conclusion.

The criminal element of the story is nicely balanced with the romance element as we follow the interaction between Michael and Sean with their respective partners.

This is a compulsive, emotional, and edge-of-your-seat read. Highly recommended if you like crime, action, edgy, suspense fiction.