How lovely to discover another great Scottish crime series set in Edinburgh featuring DI Helen Birch and DC Amy Kato, this is the third and I really liked the central protagonist, DI Birch, with her complicated personal history, with a father, Jamieson, who had run out on the family and who she has not seen since she was 12 years old, and a brother, Charlie, who had disappeared for 14 years and is now in prison. She visits Charlie regularly although he is having a hard time, being so seriously assaulted in prison that he ends up in hospital, she worries about him. She is traumatised when her father gets in touch after so long, what could he possibly have to say that she would want to listen to? The good thing is that she is in a relationship she feels good about with high flying lawyer, Anjan Chaudry who defended Charlie in court.

Helen gets drawn into a police inquiry that her boss, DCI McLeod wants her to keep out of, leaving it to Amy to carry out some preliminary inquiries. Robertson Bennet arrives in Edinburgh from the United States after working in the IT industry for some years. After an absence of 30 years, he is looking for his parents, George and Euphemia 'Phamie' MacDonald who have gone missing. He had left Scotland, taking his parents savings with him, is now experiencing financial difficulties and needing his inheritance. Birch and Kato find themselves in deep waters in a case that turns out to be both traumatising and more complex than they could ever have imagined. In a narrative that covers domestic violence and abuse with journal entries by Phamie included, Helen finds George, a trainspotter, went under another name, Ginger Mack, a man that raise terrible suspicions in her mind and interspersed in the story are media reports of young women going missing through the years.

Askey writes well written and compelling crime fiction, and I really liked her characters, particularly Helen, a driven and determined women for whom instincts and hunches play a big part, and Amy is the perfect foil for her. The women have a wonderfully close and supportive relationship that works really well, Helen doesn't always get it right, and she is fortunate in that she has Anjan and Amy who prove to be good sounding boards for her ideas, and help keep her grounded. This is great, entertaining and engaging crime fiction where Edinburgh provides a wonderful backdrop to the most disturbing of police investigations. Many thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for an ARC.

Cover Your Tracks sees a return for DI Helen Birch in this the second book in a series by Claire Askew and like the previous book this is a very good police procedural with many twists and turns that will keep you hooked until the very last page.

The storyline is well told and the main characters clearly identifiable which all adds to the book

This is developing into an excellent series and one I would thoroughly recommend

When Robertson Bennet reports his long estranged parents George and Euphemia MacDonald missing, little did DI Helen Birch and DC Amy Kato imagine they would find themselves involved in such a complex case. It seems the last time the old couple are seen is around 2015, so where are they? George is a ‘foamer’, a railway enthusiast this becomes integral to the enquiry.

First of all the case is really interesting as investigation reveals that George is a terrible man, controlling at the very least and certainly guilty of domestic abuse and the whole case becomes shocking as more evidence comes to light. Helen Birch is very likeable, she’s funny at times, obstinate, as tenacious as a pit bull and guilty of good hunches much to DCI McLeod’s fury. She has a difficult family background especially for a copper, so this to me makes her an intriguing fictional detective. In this book we get more insight into her family as she wrestles with a lot of personal stuff balancing that alongside the investigation. Amy Kato is very likeable and is a terrific foil for Helen. As always, I love the Edinburgh and Portobello setting and some of the story is set at Carstairs junction which provides an atmospheric backdrop to the dramatic events. It’s well written, there’s clarity in the storytelling and the dialogue feels realistic.

However, I think around 60% the story becomes a bit flat and drawn out although it does then pick up pace again. Helen Birch is slow on the uptake with two very obvious pieces of information and I find that doesn’t match her razor sharp insights elsewhere and her obvious perception. Having said that I did enjoy the book and the end is fitting and feels right.

Overall, an enjoyable read, I like how it starts as a low key investigation and becomes something startlingly big. I look forward to reading the next one in the series.

With thanks to NetGalley and Hodder and Stoughton for the ARC.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into romance stories and literary fiction however I wanted to take the opportunity to read something from outside my norm. And I am glad I did!! Thank you for opening up my mind to something totally different.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for an advance copy of Cover Your Tracks, the third novel to feature Edinburgh based DI Helen Birch of Police Scotland.

Robertson Bennett returns to Scotland after a thirty year estrangement to visit his parents, except he can’t find them, alive or dead. DI Helen Birch isn’t sure what to think but she thinks there’s something not quite right and asks DC Amy Kato to investigate. The more she thinks about it, the more she starts to dig herself and what she uncovers leads to more questions.

I enjoyed Cover Your Tracks which has an interesting and unusual premise and a surprising conclusion. It is told from the investigative point of view, Birch and Kato, so the reader can live the investigation with them and, potentially, make the same deductions. This is good and bad, as Birch doesn’t always see clearly and her blindness to the obvious can be frustrating.

I am new to this series so I didn’t have any preconceptions when I started reading. I liked the opening chapters with this strange case and the various permutations it offered. After that, until it perked up at the end, I found it quite boring. Don’t get me wrong, there are some stunning developments in this middle section but how they come about takes a lot of swallowing, otherwise the novel is full of Birch’s hunches and neglect of viable leads, until the plot cries out for them, for these hunches. I love police procedurals but I can’t say I see this as one, more of a mystery.

I can’t say I warmed to Helen Birch. She is wilful, obstinate and overly sure of her hunches. There would be no novel without many of them panning out but it’s no way to run a professional investigation. I assume that her attitudes stem from a troubled childhood and a brother on the wrong side of the law, who, incidentally, seems more clued up on personal interaction than she does.

Cover Your Tracks is a solid read.

Cover Your Tracks is another great crime novel from Claire Askew, featuring once more the engaging and intriguing Helen Birch..I'm a fan of this series- three books in and the quality of writing and storytelling only gets better with each passing book. 

This time round a demanding son looking for his parents draws Helen into a complex case which will uncover many dark deeds - at the same time she is dealing with the fallout from the return of long lost brother Charlie. 

The plotting is taut and believable, Helen is a layered character who you happily travel along with, forever following her own path and intuition. The case itself is addictively unpredictable and overall this should be a huge hit with crime fans. 

Recommended.

This is exactly my type of crime novel. Two great leads in DI Helen Birch and DC Amy Kato, they have a good bond, their dialogue is convincing, they are both prone to becoming absorbed by a case to the detriment of work-life balance, but despite having personal issues crop up they are not the cliched damaged, lonely police officers often portrayed in crime fiction. I liked the dynamic of Birch following a hunch and getting drawn into what was, initially, a missing persons case and gaining censure from her superior while her colleague, while equally invested, provides a note of caution.

Askew's plot had me interested from the get go. Edinburgh and environs are portrayed convincingly. Although the plot involves cold cases of missing women, likely assaulted prior to being murdered, there was realism without gratuitous description of abuse/violence against women.

Askew has a new fan! I'll be seeking out her previous novels.

Really enjoyed the descriptive style and well rounded characters in this book and I look forward to reading more from this author

Third book in the series another tense chilling thriller.Set in Edinburgh well written characters atmosphere perfectly drawn.#netgalley#coveryourtracks.

Set in and around Edinburgh this thriller moves quickly and intriguingly to its conclusion.Good characters,well drawn.

DI Helen Birch, based in Edinburgh, is faced with a belligerent man demanding that Police Scotland find his missing parents, who he’s not seen since he left as a young man, taking their savings with him. It’s obviously not just about that, he needs money to boost is ailing business. Unfortunately things don’t turn out quite how either the police or Robertson Bennet, son of the missing couple quite expect.

This is the 3rd book about Helen, but, not having read the previous 2 books is not a problem, as this is definitely a stand alone read. However, I’m definitely going to read the first 2 if they are as good as this one.

I know Edinburgh quite well and I could imagine myself there as it is described by the author. Her characters are well rounded and believable, the pacing of the book is excellent, I definitely didn’t want to put it down, and the ending isn’t quite as expected. I would recommend this book, I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of her work.
Thanks to netgalley and the publishers for an ARC in return for an honest review,

I’ve read the first two books in this series, which follow Edinburgh based police detective Helen Birch, and loved them, so it was a real treat to get this latest novel early. Askew writes really smart and interesting crime fiction that never treats male violence against women gratuitously. Cover Your Tracks begins with a missing elderly couple, and Birch and her colleagues worrying that the husband has harmed his wife, but it goes somewhere entirely unexpected. I recommend Askew’s novels to everyone I know who likes crime fiction and I’ll continue to do so with this new novel.

Robertson Bennet has not been in Edinburgh for 25 years. he's looking for his parents - and his inheritance. But there's no sign of any of them...

It should be straightforward enough, but of course it isn't. DI Helen Birch, already preoccupied with her brother Charlie's assault in prison, doesn't like the look of it. And she likes it even less when far more serious crimes come to the surface

Cover Your Tracks is the third of Claire Askew’s novels centred around Edinburgh DI, Helen Birch; what is more, it’s the third one I’ve read this year, which says something about the continuing quality of Askew’s writing. Her latest offering centres around a subject which has been hovering in the wings of both her previous books, namely, missing people. Birch’s own life has been blighted by the disappearance of her younger brother Charlie, a character central to What You Pay For, Askew’s previous book, and, although by no means as troubling, her father has also been absent since she was twelve. Now she finds herself confronted by a belligerent Scottish American, Robertson Bennet, demanding that she locate his missing parents for him. Robertson, or Robert MacDonald as he was born, has had no contact with his family since 1986 and not finding them at the address he expected he considers it the polices’ job to locate them for him. Birch explains, rather more politely than I would have done, that this is not the polices’ job, but Bennet refuses to be put off and returns with what he claims is evidence that his mother may be in danger as a result of his father’s acknowledged aggressive behaviour. Subsequent enquiries confirm that George MacDonald is indeed known to the police but the whereabouts of both him and Bennet’s mother, Euphemia, more commonly called Pharmie, prove to be elusive. Helen‘s superior, DCI McLeod, considers the whole business to be a waste of her time and tells her to hand it over to DC Amy Kato, but Helen is intrigued, and never one to follow orders blindly, is unable to stay away from the case.

Following up on suggestions that George was well known in the train spotting community, it gradually becomes apparent that he had, in fact, helped the police with their enquiries far more often than Birch and Kato originally realised, calling himself on those occasions, Ginger Mack, and that almost always his involvement had been in relation to missing women. The novel is punctuated by newspaper reports concerning the disappearance of some of these women, the oldest of which dates back a full fifty years. We read the stories of Suzannah (Suzie) Hay and Christine Turnbull and encounter the heartbreak of Maisie Kerr’s mother, still hoping for news of her daughter who vanished in 1999.

Despite McLeod’s edict, Helen becomes more and more involved, but at the same time she is distracted by what is happening to her brother, now serving a long jail sentence. Branded not only because of his association with a senior police officer but also as the man responsible for the jailing of a major crime lord, Charlie almost inevitably, has become the target of prison violence and when this lands him seriously injured in hospital the fact that he has retaliated and is therefore almost certainly looking at an extension to his sentence simply piles the pressure on for his sister. Not, however, that Helen needs Charlie’s help to feel that she is snowed under by family concerns, because after a gap of more than two decades her father has finally got in touch again and unsurprisingly her first thought is that any renewed contact is bound to bring trouble. Perhaps this is why, when an anonymous tipoff is received, Birch misinterprets the message.

And this, I’m afraid, is where I had a problem with the novel because I didn’t misinterpret the message. Despite the amount of crime fiction I read I am normally still hopeless at guessing who done it, let alone how and why but in the case of Cover Your Tracks I had the whole thing sorted from the moment that message arrived, which made the last two-fifths or so of the book something of an anti-climax. I tell you, I could have saved Police Scotland a fortune in digging time! Perhaps for some that would be a minor quibble, but I like the suspense ratcheted up to the end and so ultimately the book was something of a disappointment in terms of plot. Nevertheless, it’s still a very good read simply because of the quality of the writing and the development of the characters and I shall certainly not be put off reading the next in the series, whenever that should be available.

With thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for a review copy.

‘Cover Your Tracks’ is Claire Askew’s third novel in her DI Helen Birch series and is just as tense and intriguing a read as the first two stories. Helen is still coming to terms with the fact that her younger brother, Charlie, is in prison. On a happier note, her relationship with Anjan Chaudhry ‘– her personal favourite lawyer -’ is giving her a lot of joy. Once more, the Edinburgh setting is a character in its own right and adds to the authenticity of the narrative.
Unsurprisingly, given the title, ‘Cover Your Tracks’ focuses both on railway settings and well-hidden secrets. When the slightly improbable Robertson Bennet turns up at Fettes police station after decades in the USA, hoping that the police will find his estranged elderly parents, Birch gradually realises that this is no ordinary family search.
Inevitably, Askew’s police procedurals focus on difficult subjects and in this novel domestic abuse comes under scrutiny. As in life, there are no easy explanations given or quick solutions to this terrible behaviour. Instead, the author writes with sympathy and insight, encouraging the reader to understand why people seem unable to break away from their tormentor. The ludicrous Bennet aside, Askew’s characters are extremely credible, not least because of her authentic sounding dialogue. And there’s no doubting her ability to craft memorable prose: her use of language ranges from the lyrical to the shudder-inducing!
Readers already invested in DI Helen Birch’s world will love this latest addition. Anyone new to it could begin here but might be best advised to begin at the beginning with ‘All the Hidden Truths’.
My thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.