If you love a tense, well-plotted and twisty police procedural, you’re absolutely reading the right review!

DI Anjelica Henley works for the Serial Crimes Unit in Deptford, not a team that has an easy ride. When they get called in to investigate the brutal murder of a local pastor, they find a second body in the church…a body that has been subjected to unspeakable torture. This marks the start of an investigation that will test the team to their limits and uncover some horrific crimes.

For those who read Matheson’s previous (excellent) book in the series (‘The Jigsaw Man’, DI Anjelica Henley’s first outing), you know what to expect – and it is everything you’re hoping for and more!

DI Henley makes an appealing central figure – as a young, black detective, she faces some shocking and racist attitudes about her capabilities. Luckily, she’s extremely capable! It’s great to see her leading the investigation with flair, empathy and intelligence – even as she is wrestling her own demons regarding her past and her marriage. Her sidekick, DC Salim Ramouter (another fabulous character) is also seen within the context of his tricky domestic situation, something that is really interesting and avoids that common trap of crime fiction that only female police officers seem to have a problematic family life!

The rest of the Serial Crimes team are also distinctive characters – one of my pet hates in police procedurals are secondary team members who don’t have any distinguishing features beyond their names (which I’m terrible at keeping track of!) Matheson avoids this and we get a team who have realistic working relationships marked with the banter of people who work long hours together. My favourite is Ezra who is a master of technology, even if his methods might not be entirely above board!

As with Matheson’s first book, there are some disturbing moments of gore – especially around the torture in the binding room. This probably isn’t for those of a delicate nature – although it does add to the reader’s compulsion to seek justice for the victims and find out who committed such atrocities.

The plotting is cleverly done throughout – it felt like a fast-paced and high-stakes investigation without doubt, especially as the twists were thrown in and the story took some surprising turns. As a reader, however, you’re in safe hands with Matheson so it never disappoints and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

I’d recommend this highly to anyone who enjoys clever, engaging police procedurals with convincing detectives at the heart. Matheson’s writing is confident and compelling – it’s difficult to believe that this is only her second crime novel. I cannot wait for Book 3!

What an excellent read this is! I had really enjoyed reading the first book in this series, The Jigsaw Man and was thrilled to discover the sequel The Binding Room was available.
It is a dark and twisted story that reminds us that human monsters are far more terrifying than any supernatural entity could ever dream to be. The characters are wonderfully written, realistically flawed and relatable. I cannot wait to read in this series and wholeheartedly recommend!

“Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are gone from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

1 John 4:1

Wow! Wow! Wow! I recently read #thejigsawman and it blew my mind so when I found out there was a sequel coming, I needed it immediately!!

Nadine Matheson did not disappoint!!! The villains in this book are sooo good (and by good I mean bad) the crimes they committed were the literally so gruesome and evil, and so detailed you could almost feel them yourself! The whole time, I thought I knew what was happening and then it all changed and I was back to solving the crime without with Henley herself ! Sooo good !! I read this book in one day and it’s pretty long but i could not put it down !!

🪢This book can be read as a stand alone, but of course you would have a better understanding of the characters of you read #thejigsawman first (and it’s worth it)

🪢perfect series for fans of criminal minds and serial killers !!!

I got The Binding Room by Nadine Matheson, for free from good reads for a fair and honest review.

The Binding Room is an investigation into the death of a respected pastor who is found with multiple stab wounds.

However the case soon becomes more complicated when a secret room of the church is found containing a man who is only just alive and.

The Binding Room is definitely not on the cosy side of the mystery genre, especially with the description of the dead bodies that are discovered in the novel.
In addition, I do not normally post trigger warnings in my reviews as each person has different things that will trigger them and as an individual I feel that I would never be able to mention all the individual triggers.
Having said that this novel does deal with mental health issues throughout this novel in areas such as PTSD and Schizophrenia amongst others.

As for the story itself with the Binding Room being at its heart a police procedural as a reader there are the usual tropes in this genre although the story never feels like Nadine Matheson the writer is writing by numbers as the investigation portrayed in the story never feels predictable.

I am not saying that there are twists in the story that are both so setup that as a reader you can see them coming from miles away, while all the socks and surprises were all typical of this genre and never came out of the blue if you picked up on the clues.
In addition to the crime and the investigation in the novel do give the story the is the investigators themselves and in the Binding Room with the main Detective, Inspector Anjelica Henly, and her colleges really added to the enjoyment of the story.

While the novel does examine some of the personal lives of the detectives, this does not affect the story in any way, but enhances the story by making them all human with difficulties of their own.

Having said that I would recommend The Binding Room by Nadine Mathesonto any readers who like police procedures that are hard hitting will definitely enjoy this stoey,

I loved The Jigsaw Man and have recommended it to a few people who have also loved it, so I was really looking forward to reading the follow up. And I was not disappointed.

This book has got everything you need in a crime thriller.

The case is gruesome and disturbing and yet utterly compelling. It taps into people desire to help others, to find community in organised religion and fear of complex mental health issues. It explores the power people can have over others and how this can be abused.

Pastor Caleb Annan is found murdered in his church. The murder is brutal and appears to be personal. When a search of the church building uncovers further discoveries the case becomes extremely complex. Henley are her team are having to investigate the murder of a man that it is very difficult to sympathise with: a man who practice what he preached.

I love DI Henley. She is dedicated and clever. She understands how to get the best out of her team and her emotional intelligence often means that she can get the answers she needs from suspects. She is a deeply flawed character. Still recovering form the events in her previous big investigation and the attack by Olivier, she has demons of her. Her relationship with Pellacia is causes problems both at work and at home. She is also facing political pressure from a local MP with an agenda of their own.

The characters of the Serious Crime Unit are really developed in this book – especially Ramouter who is struggling with his own personal life. The bonds between the team who have all shared such traumatic experiences are string and they are all supportive of each other.

This is a dark and twisty thriller. It is utterly compelling and I really enjoyed it. Thank you to HQ Stories for my gifted copy of the book and for invited me to be a part of this thrilling blog tour.

I was looking forward to reading this as The Jigsaw Man was a solid thriller but unfortunately this didn’t work for me. There was too much focus on the characters and their backstory which meant the main plot suffered. At times it was very slow and repetitive and when we did get plot progression I found it too far fetched.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

This is this authors second book in the DI Henley series. She investigates the death of a pastor, but then other things happen that make a huge case, which has lots of of sub storylines, and Henley must pick apart the facts to catch the murderer.

This was an excellent read. I loved catching up with this detective. She’s a great character, with many flaws. But she does her job well, even if her personal life is a bit of a disaster at times. She’s also very relatable. The writing was excellent, and very easy to read. There were twists and turns galore, making it the perfect read for crime thriller and police procedural fans.

Following DI Anjelica Healey is back after The Jigsaw Man. She and many of her team are still suffering from the aftermath of what they suffered from Olivier when they are drawn into another case.
Called to the murder of Pastor Caleb Annan they find a young man locked in a room in the church, almost dead and what happened to him becomes more important to the team than the death of the Pastor. As the story unfolds the team race against time to solve the cases. Mental health issues are very much explored in this title and treated with empathy. There are twists and turns and the members of the team and their home lives are explored.
Another great read. Can't wait to read more about DI Healey and her team1
Many thanks to Netgalley/Nadine Matheson/HQ for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

I loved The Jigsaw Man, the first book in this series and this follow-up is an excellent addition to what I sincerely hope will become a long running series.

Set in Deptford in South East London, this police procedural features a diverse set of characters whose personal lives and character you do get to know quite well and that helps to cement them and their personalities in your mind. D.I. Anjelica Henley and her partner Salim Ramouter of the Serial Crimes Unit are both struggling with a mix of personal issues and serious trauma resulting from events in The Jigsaw Man.

The Binding Room is a meaty read and comes with all the visceral, gritty scenes that fit so well into this beautifully plotted dark and sometimes very gory read. I found it compelling reading with beautifully realised characters, a complex web of related incidents and a background that resonates with realism and takes us through some serious issues including racism and the way in which the police force is often, quite rightly, suspiciously regarded by local communities.

There’s also a strong thread running through this book of the paucity of help available to those with mental health problems and the way in which the vulnerable can be exploited.

A cleaner, Uliana Piontek discovers the brutally murdered body of Pastor Caleb Annan in his Deptford church. Searching the church, DI Henley makes another gruesome discovery. In a hidden room, no bigger than a cupboard, a young man lies unmoving, chained to a bare bed, beaten and bruised, his life fast extinguishing.

As the team investigate both crimes, they come up against many barriers and under political and community pressure. Their investigations lead them to other crimes that must be related, but it’s not obvious how they can be. Added to the personal pressures that both Henley and Ramouter are under, this pressure and the media scrutiny results in tension and fraught nerves.

Almost no-one is telling the whole truth in this tense and compelling crime thriller that builds layers upon layers like an oil painting with 3 dimensional aspects. It is rich and varied, and slashed through with scarlet.

Verdict: Another smashing and immersive read from Nadine Matheson who knows how to build a multi-layered and complex thriller that grips like a vice.

My thanks to HQ for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Binding Room’ by Nadine Matheson.

This is Matheson’s second book in her series of police procedurals featuring DI Anjelica Henley and her team at London’s Serial Crimes Unit. Given that Mathewson is a criminal defence lawyer she brings a great deal of authenticity to her storylines.

‘The Binding Room’ opens with the discovery of the dead body of Caleb Annan, the pastor of Deptford’s first megachurch, the Church of Annan the Prophet. He has been repeatedly stabbed.

As Henley searches the church she is shocked to find a hidden room in which an emaciated young man has been tied to a bed and is close to death. It quickly becomes clear that he has been tortured for a considerable time as part of an exorcism. Caleb’s fingerprints are found in the room along with other unidentified prints. It appears that something very disturbing has been taking place at the church and this man is not the only victim of these rites.

Caleb’s wife, Serena, is in denial and reaches out to an influential MP to express her outrage as she feels that the press and police are giving more attention to the young white man than finding her husband’s killer.

For DI Henley such accusations of racial bias hit hard given that as a black woman she is all too aware of the issues. She shares that she has “dark memories of how every person of colour that she’d encountered, while doing her job as a police officer, had looked at her with either disgust, bewilderment, or, even worse, betrayal.”

Overall, ‘The Binding Room’ proved a well-plotted, gripping police procedural that deals with a variety of disturbing themes. Nadine Matheson continues to develop her characters as well as utilises the gritty South London setting. The final scene of the novel suggests that there will be a third novel, hopefully in the not too distant future.

I would like to thank the author, the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read an ARC of this book. Having read the previous book by this author I was looking forward to reading this book and I wasn’t disappointed, it was a brilliant book and I will be recommending this book to everyone I know.

This book has just cemented it for me that Nadine Matheson can write amazing police procedural books! Earlier this month I finished The Jigsaw Man (which I loved too) and then jumped straight into The Binding Room. What a book this was!!

It’s no secret that larger books scare me and the 500 pages did look a bit daunting, but every single page of this book was needed and I wish there had been more - I didn’t want this book to end! The larger page count didn’t detract from the pace of the book, it was still fast and intense and you constantly wanted to turn the page and find out more.

I loved the characters in this book! DI Anjelica Henley is fantastic and I found it so refreshing to see Nadine have the main protagonist as a black female. She is strong, gutsy, compassionate and intelligent and although she has many flaws, you can’t but like her!

This book is written so diversely and inclusively and it’s important that this is acknowledged as I feel diversity can often be lacking in crime books. Nadine briefly touches upon racism in the book, not as a direct link to the police case, but encounters in very normal day to day life. I found the religious aspects of the book really fascinating and the way mental health issues are looked at in the book was also admirable. There were so many aspects that I loved about this book, it’s hard to write them all down!

One thing I will say is that I felt this book read much better after having read The Jigsaw Man previously. Yes, The Binding Room can work as a standalone book but you miss some of the details about DI Henley’s previous case and this could be confusing for some.

This is definitely a book (series) I would urge you to go out and buy and I’m hoping that @queennaads has more up her sleeve and we will be seeing DI Henley and her team back again soon!

From the opening chapter of this book I was hooked! It’s so gruesome and utterly terrifying that I just had to keep reading to find out what was going on here! The set up is excellent and with Ramouter and Henley still reeling from the recent Olivier case you feel the tension within the SCU. I had very recently read The Jigsaw Man so I felt up to speed with the cast and their backstories. Although you could read this as a stand-alone I would definitely recommend picking up The Jigsaw Man first as it adds to the experience (and is an excellent read)! I love the camaraderie between the members of the SCU team and Remouter and Henley's friendship is a lovely touch of lightness. Matheson’s writing is becoming better and better and I can’t wait to read the next in this series. An absolute star of British crime fiction - highly recommend!

When the cleaner of a local church finds the pastor Caleb Annan dead, Detective Anjelica Henley and her team are brought in to investigate. It is a brutal and bloody attack, leaving no doubt that this should be treated as murder but on top of an already intriguing case, Anjelica then discovers the body of a man in a hidden room behind a storage area in the church. He had been bound to a bed, tortured and left there to die. Immediately they begin to look into Caleb's past in an attempt to find out if he could have been involved, but before they can make much progress with their enquiries, another body is found...

If you are wondering if The Binding Room should be your next book choice, you only have to read the first paragraph to set the tone for the remainder of the story - it's dark, it's detailed, it's extremely gruesome and I loved it! For anyone like me who enjoys the darker side of crime fiction, Nadine Matheson is definitely an author who is on the same wavelength. Only a few pages into the story, I already knew I was onto a winner, and then the Cluedo references started to appear and I was 100% sold!

Full of twists and chilling revelations, The Binding Room is a disturbing novel which only gets more and more shocking as you read on. At the same time, the wonderful relationships which were established in the previous book, The Jigsaw Man, break up the gore and provide an occasional (and welcome) breather from a very intense story. Despite the fact that Anjelica along with DSU Stephen Pellacia and DC Ramouter are facing political pressures from the local MP as well as widespread racism, their bonds are strong and believable, adding a realness and authenticity to quite an extreme investigation.

With some very graphic murders, this is not a story for the faint-hearted, but wow, for me this is exactly what I want from a crime thriller. Sometimes I feel like a book was written with me as a reader in mind, and this is definitely one of those. If you're a crime fiction fan looking for a dark, rollercoaster ride of a novel, I can't recommend this more!

Not a gentle tale about librarians looking after cherished books, but the second in a gritty, police procedural series, that encompasses Mental illness, abduction, torture, religious extremism, exorcism and coercive control. It is gruesome, macabre, and the level of detail in this murder mystery, you would expect to find in a post-mortem report, probably too much for sensitive readers. Having said all that, it is strangely addictive, and you really want to find out why such atrocities have occurred.
It is best to read the first book, The Jigsaw Man, before you tackle this. It gives you the necessary background to the characters, their private and work relationships, and also details a case they all worked on, that still has horrific consequences for the team.
A book best read in the day time, it could prey on your mind otherwise. A magnificent five star rating.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers HQ books for my advance digital copy in exchange for my honest review. I will leave reviews to Goodreads and Amazon.

Great read. Gruesome in parts as young people are found bound and tortured but an interesting police procedural considering mental illness, religious extremism, and the exorcism and coercive control.

A pastor stabbed to death. A secret torture room. A man bound to the bed.

Later, elsewhere, another body tied down.

The victims didn't know each other. No connection.

DI Henley and her team really have their work cut out..

Excellent

Nadine Matheson has written a superb sequel to The Jigsaw Man. The Binding room is gruesome, spine- chilling and horrifying and yet it is very addictive due to the cast of characters . I love the relationship between the police in charge of the case. There is humour and sadness but it makes such a wonderful story. Can't wait for the next one.

With thanks to netgalley and Harpercollins for the opportunity to read in exchange for an honest review.
Called in to investigate the murder of the Pastor of a super church, Anjelica Henley discovers the body of a young man who is near to death. This discovery leads to other, similar bodies who have undergone ‘exorcism’ to cure their mental health problems. The investigations overlap and twist and turn giving the reader a gripping story. There were lots of mistakes in the text - misspellings or even the completely wrong word at times which I hope are sorted out for the final print and e-book editions. But this was a great read.

This is the second book in the DI Anjelica Henley of the Serial Crime Unit, series. I really enjoyed the Jigsaw man and this was equally as good.

Pastor Caleb Annan is found brutally stabbed to death in his church, The Church of Annan the Prophet, in Deptford. Whilst at the church looking around the crime scene, DI Henley discovers a second victim in another room, who at first appears to be dead but he is found to be clinging to life by a thread, after being tortured. After another body is found, again tortured with the same MO, it appears they have a serial killer who seems to be a religious zealot, attempting exorcisms.
A gripping plot, quite brutal and disturbing at times especially when from the victim’s point of view, whilst they are being tortured. The developing relationships within the team add to the book’s appeal, both with the bond between Henley and DC Ramouter and the tension and attraction between Henley and Stephen Pellacia.
The book deals with mental health issues and how someone can go from having a career, home and marriage to living on benefits in a rented flat. Good ending, I didn’t see it coming.