This is the third book in this series featuring the hero "Mad" Sam Carew. Sam used to be a police detective but now he runs a construction company and a private detective agency. He still keeps in contact with the detectives he used to work with in particular his friend Owen but his former boss, DCI Bowman, he resents, as he blames him for the loss of his job in the police.

Sam is approached to help a beautiful woman because her father, she says, was framed. Anyway, Sam is enticed to help her and discovers that one of the framed father’s murder victims was killed by a blow to the head with a hammer. A series of grisly murders occurs all apparently carried out using a special hammer and Sam, as he uncovers more and more details, is attacked twice unsuccessfully by the murderer. He discovers that there is a crime family called the Robinsons, who are involved in prostitution, drugs, blackmail and even building, like Sam. What is their connection to the seemingly random murders?

The murderer seems to be receiving information from the police as a couple of nearly fatal mistakes occur and no one but the police and Sam knew the details. Is DCI Bowman informing as well as everything else?

Ken McCoy writes in a very gripping style and the pages of this fairly long book just zoom by. It is so entertaining you just don't want it to end, but end it must and it does so in a classic resolution that kept me guessing.

I enjoyed this title very much as Ken McCoy writes with the experience that he has had from 25 years of running a building company and many other jobs as well, before he took up writing. An experienced writer now this is his twelfth book.

Terry Halligan, England
August 2007