This is the second book following the career of Dr Vanessa Marwood, a forensic entomologist. She has started her new job, working at a forensics lab in New York, and has been there for about six months.
There is a spate of deaths, and it turns out that all the victims have received jewellery containing whole, or parts of, real insects. Vanessa is called in to investigate and finds out how the deaths are being caused. She also picks up a thread from the first book that points to a high-value, illegal trade in endangered insects. This introduces the danger of investigating powerful, international gangs, and leads back to her own past, again with clever plot twists.
I enjoyed this book much more than the first one. It was equally well written, but it flowed more easily and had me thoroughly gripped, wanting to know what happened next.
As with the first book, there are rather a lot of names to remember, and, in addition, the reader will need to get up to speed with the hierarchy of police roles in New York.
