Why She Ran by Geraldine Hogan

Why She Ran by Geraldine Hogan

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Publication Date - 19th December 2019

Publisher - Bookouture

I received an ARC courtesy of @netgalley and @bookouture.

Yesterday they were a family like any other…

Twenty-year-old Rachel McDermott was your typical girl-next-door. She loved her job as a nurse, was close to her family in the small Irish town of Corbally and seemed to have no enemies. So when she is brutally murdered, the local community reels in horror and Detective Iris Locke is put on the case. 

The main suspect is her close friend, sixteen-year-old Eleanor Marshall, a tearaway teenager with addiction problems whose parents have long since turned their backs on her. Eleanor was last seen fleeing the scene where Rachel’s body was found and is now missing in the woods near the Comeragh mountains. 

Eleanor’s sister Karena insists Eleanor wouldn’t have hurt her best friend, but a day later, when Karena is found dead in the area Eleanor is hiding, Iris knows things don’t look good for the runaway teen. She doesn’t want to believe that Eleanor is her sister’s killer, but all the evidence seems to point that way. 

But Iris can’t let go of the elements of the case she doesn’t have answers for. The fact that Rachel’s father died in suspicious circumstances. The strange company that Rachel was keeping the night before she died. Was it guilt or fear that made Eleanor run? And can Iris find her before it is too late?

This is the second book in Geraldine Hogan’s Iris Locke series and the only one I have read so far. It can be read as a stand alone book but I feel as if it might have been better to have read the previous book as I don’t like not knowing answers to my questions!

I liked the characters of Iris and DS Slattery and they were well developed. The banter between them was great and the final couple of chapters really emphasised the bond which they shared.

I did find I was putting this book down a lot as it wasn’t gripping me with the story line. Yes, I wanted to find Eleanor but that was the only reason I kept on reading. I wish there had been more placed on her point of view i.e. more flashbacks as her medication cloud lifted as this would have allowed the plot to have developed more evenly. However, the plot seemed slow to develop and there were too many bits that felt like padding i.e. the death of Rachel’s ‘father’ William etc.

Unless, this became part of Kindle Unlimited or there was a low price for an ebook I don’t think I would want to spend my money on it.