I read and reviewed each of the six books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating for the collection is an average of the individual ratings: Heartsick and Kill You Twice both earned four stars from me, Evil at Heart was the nadir of the series at two stars, and everything else got three.

These are likeable thrillers. A couple of them are very good indeed, and I never, ever have any complaint with the pacing. They are tautly constructed, with little waffle, and an effective amount of gore and psychological fuckery. However, they have one great flaw, and that is the protagonist. Archie Sheridan is one of the most deeply unlikeable cops I have ever read. He's meant to be a good guy, but his prevarication, his endless hand-wringing, and his complete and total inability to take out one of the most vicious serial killers of all time, on a number of separate occasions when he absolutely could have done so, make me want him dead. Not a glorious death either. Let him choke on his endless pain pills in the shower or something... just get rid of him, and hand over the Gretchen Lowell cases to someone more competent and with more common sense. Reader, I loathe him. I also feel, to be honest, increasingly more irritated with his ongoing not-quite-love-interest Susan, for putting up with all his crap. And even with Gretchen Lowell, monster as she is. What does she see in this fool?

The series seems to end in the middle of nowhere, so I'm just going to tell myself that lovely competent Henry puts a bullet in Gretchen's head, just after Archie's shower accident, and that Susan's mum finally loses her shit and slaps some sense into her idiot daughter, who at Archie's funeral asks his deeply sensible ex-wife Debbie for tips on the art of moving the fuck on, already, because Debbie has that shit locked up.