The Jigsaw Man

Written By Linda Malek
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The Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson
Reviewed by Linda
📕📕📕📕

I loved crime thrillers as a younger reader, and recently it’s proving to be the go-to genre when I’m lacking inspiration elsewhere. The Jigsaw Man did not disappoint and was a welcome change to my usual reading experience. Thank you to @hqstories for this copy and congratulations @queennads on your new novel!

It is great to finally see more women of colour write in a genre that has been dominated by white men for what has felt like centuries!

The Jigsaw Man is tenacious, detailed and graphic which is what you’d expect from a thriller, but when it’s written by an esteemed criminal lawyer just know it’s also expertly paced and perfectly written.

Set in South East London around the Deptford area, a stone’s throw away from where Nadine grew up, DI Anjelica Henley comes back to work after a hiatus following a near fatal accident at the hands of the notorious Jigsaw Killer, Peter Oliver. But on her first day back on duty she’s called to a crime scene where his trademark is all over the dismembered body parts washed up on the banks of the river. Locked away for life in Belmarsh it can’t be him, and so there is a copycat killer on the loose.

Here, begins the quest to find the killer and for DI Henley to address some of the skeletons that have been pushed out of sight and out of mind. Matheson cleverly laces other themes alongside Henley’s investigation and we come to know DI Henley personally: her frustrations with her husband who doesn’t grasp that she shouldn’t have to choose between her career or her family; her struggles with PTSD, her colleagues who underestimate her because she is a woman and the microaggressions she faces as a senior Black woman in a predominately white police force. I found DI Henley to be a fresh voice and I very much enjoyed the character development.

This book is thorough and covers a lot of ground but therein lies enough of a backstory for a prequel and a sequel and I await them in eager anticipation! Highly recommended.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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