Dark Heart

Set in southern Spain, 'Dark Heart' is the second crime novel in the Jacaranda Dunne mysteries.

Jacaranda Dunn is an ex-Metropolitan police officer, who has moved to Spain to open a detective agency in Malaga, and be nearer to her mother, the Marquesa of Calderon del Bosque. JD to her friends and colleagues, this female detective has two assistants: Linda, who had previously worked for a criminal lawyer, and Ignacio, a young computer technician who can find his way around anything digital, but not always legally.

JD's love life is complicated. She is having an on-off relationship with Federico, a captain in the Guardia Civil, who loves her but feels she is just using him in order to have access to police resources. Tim, a local reporter, is constantly inviting her to go out with him, and Jacobo who makes television documentaries, is an ex-lover who is still her best friend. But JD is haunted by the death of her husband five years previously, and won't consider a permanent relationship with anyone until she discovers who was behind his brutal stabbing. She also has another worry; Thomas Steed, the drug dealer who was sentenced to fourteen years in a maximum security prison in the UK, as a result of her testimony, has been given early release. The last words she'd heard him say were a public threat to her safety. But does he know where she is?

After her recent success in finding a missing teenager, the Guardia Civil are eager to work with JD again. So when a well known actor is found murdered during the Malaga Film Festival, the Guardia Civil once more turn to JD and her team for help. The murder is far from straightforward. The killer has left a trail of clues for the police to follow, but the question is why? And what is he trying to tell them? They can find no obvious motive for the murder of this popular actor, whose naked body was found in the locked basement of the Picasso Museum.

This page turning mystery takes JD and her team along a trail of dead ends and through the bloody world of terrorism, until they discover the perpetrator is about to kill again. He is closer to home than they had realised.