Whispers of the Dead by Simon Beckett

This is the third novel I've read by mystery writer Simon Beckett, and it's only been a few weeks since I read his first one, "The Chemistry of Death". The second was a bit of a disappointment, but "Whispers of Death" is perhaps even better than the first book.

By now, I'm familiar with the protagonist, Dr. David Hunter, who came to a small British village called Manham in response to an advertisement for a GP, a general practitioner. His back story is that Hunter's wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident, and he left London to escape the tragic memories of their deaths brought up daily by his career as a forensic anthropologist. In short, he found it hard to deal with the death of his family while constantly working on other homicide cases for the police. After solving a murder there, Hunter returned to London with a new girlfriend, Jenny, but she leaves him after the second book
finds him bogged down again in a new murder mystery in the British Isles. One of the team of brother/sister killers from that book tracks him to his London flat, and leaves him near dead. That brings us to the beginning of this book, in which Hunter again tries to escape bad memories, this time by coming to America and the "body farm" in Tennessee, the infamous field laboratory where law enforcement personnel study real corpses, and where his old mentor teaches.

But as fate would have it, the Knoxville facility soon sees its own share of corpses, and that's just among the staff and students! Tom Lieberman, Hunter's mentor, is asked to help the local detectives at a baffling local crime scene using his special skills. However, this time Hunter has to help him, as Lieberman's health is rapidly failing, even though the local police and medical personnel are
unhappy at his interference. The case they try to solve is complicated by the fact that the killer seems to know as much about time and method of death as the Body Farm staff, and he is making the murders hard to solve by switching bodies and identities. Along the way, Hunter is stalked, Lieberman dies, and the pregnant wife of a colleague is kidnapped, before Hunter uses his instincts to
stumble onto the body farm the killer has set up at a decrepit spa.

By now, I'm familiar with Beckett's use of misdirection to throw the reader off the killer's trail, so even as he calls one character the killer, I wait for the final twist and reveal which have been the hallmark of Beckett's work so far. In the dramatic conclusion, Hunter again faces off against the true murderer, using his words and his wit to survive until help arrives. Another great novel by Simon Beckett from his reviewer, someone who generally doesn't like mystery novels, but who somehow can't stop reading Beckett books! A gruesome good time for those who like shows where crimes are solved by forensic evidence.