Question D

[Jonetta]

The team is dispatched to the home of the Daynes family where four members were discovered dead from gunshot wounds. Given the gun laws in the UK, were you curious as to how they had one? When did you begin to question that this was a murder-suicide at the hands of Helen, the mother?

[Sharon]

I didn't question anyone having a gun. There is always something available on the black market and someone who will get. Even though the UK has strict gun laws, there are many countries in Europe that don't. If someone wants a gun bad enough they can get it.

I started to question the murder-suicide a few chapters later. Kim didn't seem convinced even when Penn and Stacey were giving her the statistics. It made me pay attention to her skepticism.

[Jonetta]

The incidents of people dying by guns is ridiculously low in the UK and Europe as a whole. I was very surprised that the gun ownership wasn’t clarified. This far into the series and I believe this may be the first involving murders using guns.

I questioned the murder-suicide early on simply because depression isn’t enough for a mother to kill her own family. When that was the best they could come up with, I smelled a rat.

[Lisa - (Aussie Girl)]

It was cleared up a couple of chapters later that the gun was completely legal. It was a shotgun which had to be reloaded. Those sort of guns are also legal in Australia but an owner is scrutinized very completely and must have a license.

Only because it was a storyline in this novel did I think there was probably more to the crime than first met the eye.

[Sharon]

I forgot that we were told it was a shotgun.

[Lynn]

I didn't even think about the gun control laws in UK when I read this. I guess I've become jaded with all of the stories of gun crimes in the US.
It wouldn't have been much of a story if the murder/suicide had been what actually happened.