If I Can’t Have you by Louise Mullins (DI Emma Locke #3)

In A Pickle by Cat On A Piano / Theat... Green Shoots by Ben Westwood

If I Can’t Have you by Louise Mullins (DI Emma Locke #3)

Have you ever wanted something so much you’d do anything to get it?

I wanted her from the moment I laid eyes on her. I promised to do anything to make her mine.

#IfICantHaveYou @MullinsAuthor #LouiseMullins @Zooloo’s Book Tours @zooloo2008 #ZooloosBookTours #blogtour

But like a caged bird all she wanted was to fly away. Have you ever wanted someone so much you’d do anything to keep them? When you love someone, you should never let them go.

This is Book 3 of the DI Emma Locke series, but it can be read as a standalone.

My Review

You don’t need to have read the first two books in the series, but to be honest, it would have helped. However, there are two threads going on here – the first is the crime, the lost child, the missing persons, the murders. This is totally standalone.

But the second thread is when DI Emma Locke arrives, part way through the book, and she has history. She has obviously had a sketchy past before becoming a police officer. She is now with Johnno and helps take care of his son Jaxon, after his wife virtually abandoned the child. She is also worried about her friend Craig, who is a single parent, his son Ethan’s mother having died of an overdose. Craig is an alcoholic and things have become worse since their friend Jimmy died. All this is imported from books one and two, I guess.

I didn’t really warm to Emma. The investigation into the child’s sudden discovery is being led by DS Dafydd Tomos and I adored him. Fifty years old and suffering from PTSD after his stint in the SAS where his friend Mo was blown to pieces, and a wife in a wheelchair after a car accident, he is still so caring and empathic. His team is good too. The child whose name we discover later on, doesn’t speak and while she likes the male officers, she appears to be scared of women.

She’s slightly older than she looks and somewhat malnourished, but her clothes are new, clean and expensive, at least they would be clean if she didn’t have blood on her dress. Whose blood we don’t know at this stage.

This was a really exciting, fast-paced read. It’s also quite involved so I can’t say much more without revealing the plot. It is told in two timelines – the past from the point of view of ‘Laura’ – we initially have no idea who she is and the present which starts with the police being informed that a young girl is wandering around in the dark on her own. We swap back and forth until the past and present meet.

It’s a quick, easy read and I hope we’ll get to see more of DS Tomos in the future. He’s brilliant. In fact he deserves his own series of books.

Many thanks to @zooloo2008 for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

Louise Mullins writes full-time using the experience she gained in a prior life working in the field of forensic mental health, working with offenders and survivors of serious crimes.

To keep up to date with her latest releases, visit her website: www.louisemullinsauthor.com. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as: @mullinsauthor.