A Tapping at My Door: A gripping serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series)

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I get that the long-winded set-ups and moment-by-moment description of characters' actions were meant to create drama and suspense, but I just found them tedious.

And then the killer strikes again, and Cody realises the threat isn’t to the people of Liverpool after all – it’s to the police. Something bad happened to him in the past but what that may be is revealed quite slowly and had me utterly hooked. Further to the key theme of this particular case, there is the personal trauma and coping mechanisms of DS Nathan Cody himself that begin to become unraveled over the course of the book leaving me excited to pick up the next in the series to know more about Cody and what will happen next in his personal journey. The whole premise of the birds was interesting at first, especially the first tapping at the door, taken from Poe and giving the novel its title.Next we meet DS Nathan Cody at work in the Major Investigation Team who has just found out one of his old girlfriends has joined the team, even better they are to be partners – now that’s not awkward is it? A cop killer is on the loose in Liverpool and the police are panicked as a dead bird on the victim's face- along with a suitably cryptic message - is left at each murder scene. The whole idea of the murderer being motivated to capture birds and then plant them on the bodies of the police he kills was fine until Jackson reveals why the "birds" are so important. She spends her days juggling mom-life, reading, blogging, planning date nights with her husband and working as a nurse.

I didn't feel especially attached to Nathan Cody, so I don't think I'm likely to continue this series. The murders are gruesome and really weird, their are several suspects and there are some personal problems for the main characters. You have an unerring sense of the devil on his shoulder, but this is counterbalanced well by the curious mix of bravado, and at times deep self-questioning, that Jackson imbues into his character. I actually cared about his progression throughout the story, he very quickly became somebody that I could see as a real person.

The author is refreshingly disinclined to paint too rosy a picture of this city with its mixture of recognisable growth set against the curse of inner city deprivation, and he achieves this balance perfectly. This backstory is incredibly promising for the next book and I can’t wait to see where it takes him. Again, as I have done in the past with some authors, I will make a disclaimer, in that Dave is a friend, so take my thoughts on this as you will. When she goes outside to investigate she sees a large black bird trapped at her window and she is then struck with something hard and heavy, rammed into her skull.