Unsolved (Cal Lovett Files #1) by Heather Critchlow

He won’t rest until he finds out the truth…

Cal Lovett is obsessed with finding justice for the families of missing people. His true crime podcast is his way of helping others, even if he can’t help himself.

His sister, Margot, disappeared when he was a child. Only one man seems to know something. But he’s behind bars and can’t be trusted.

So when the family of a missing Scottish woman begs for his help, he heads to Aberdeenshire in search of the truth.

Does Cal have what it takes to unearth the secrets hiding in the hills? And what if he finds something that leads him back to the heart of his own family’s past?

My Review

Unsolved is the first in the Cal Lovett Files. I read it with my online book club – The Pigeonhole – where we read a ‘stave’ a day – usually a stave is made up of a few chapters. It’s great for crime stories as we can play amatuer detective in our comments.

Cal loves uncovering secrets in his true crime podcast, but his popularity, like his marriage, is going down the pan. He needs a gritty story to resurrect his credibility. He’ll need more than that to save his relationship with his wife Allie.

There are three main strands to this story. Cal visits a notorious serial killer in prison. It’s going to be the subject of his next podcast. His wife wants him to give up the visits because they are taking their toll on Cal. But on his last visit, the killer, Marc Dubois, tells him something that will turn his world on its axis. But is it true, or is Dubois trying to vex him?

And that leads us to the second strand. Cal’s older sister Margot disappeared without trace when Cal was nine years old. He wants to know what happened, but it’s tearing him apart.

Finally we have Layla, who also vanished. The year was 1986. She had gone for a ride on Ruby, one of the horses from the stables where she helped out, but Ruby came back badly injured and Layla was never seen again. The locals believed it was her on-off boyfriend Stephen who killed her (no body was ever discovered), but could Dubois have been involved. Layla’s parents want closure, or do they?

We also have a separate story involving Cal’s teenage daughter Chrissie, who is going through her own trials and tribulations.

I loved this story and hope that the next in the series will also be available on The Pigeonhole. It’s not perfect – there are one or two things that could have been better – but altogether it deserves a hearty 5 stars.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author, and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read.

About the Author

Heather Critchlow grew up in rural Aberdeenshire and trained as a business journalist after studying history and social science at the University of Cambridge. Her short stories have appeared in crime fiction anthologies Afraid of the Light, Afraid of the Christmas Lights and Afraid of the Shadows.