Blog tour: Prey by Vanda Symon

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘On her first day back from maternity leave, Detective Sam Shephard is thrown straight into a cold-case investigation – the unsolved murder of a highly respected Anglican priest in Dunedin.

‘The case has been a thorn in the side of the police hierarchy, and for her boss it’s personal. With all the witness testimony painting a picture of a dedicated church and family man, what possible motive could there have been for his murder?

‘But when Sam starts digging deeper into the case, it becomes apparent that someone wants the sins of the past to remain hidden. And when a new potential witness to the crime is found brutally murdered, there is pressure from all quarters to solve the case before anyone else falls prey.

‘But is it already too late…?’

In Prey, by Vanda Symon, Detective Sam Shephard’s back on the job after maternity leave with her daughter, Amelia. Her unpleasant boss DI Greg Johns’ first assignment for her is a 25-year-old cold case: in 1999, the Reverend Mark Freeman was murdered on the steps of Dunedin’s landmark cathedral, St Paul’s, after a service.

Sam’s investigation is complicated by the fact that Mark was the father of DI Johns’ now-wife, Felicity (a teenager at the time of the murder), making it difficult to interview her and other members of the Freeman family without his hot-headed – albeit blustering – interference.

Nevertheless, Sam persists, and becomes even more fired up when a key witness from outside the family is also killed. Can she untangle a long-established web of silences and secrets to get to the truth?

Catching up with Detective Sam Shephard is always a treat, and Prey was no exception.

Sam is exactly the kind of mother I expected/hoped she would be: a little overwhelmed sometimes, far from an Insta-perfect domestic goddess, bluntly matter-of-fact about the fluids leaking from both herself and her baby – but managing well enough as a team with her partner Paul, full of love and wonder, and consciously deciding not to follow the example of her own overly-critical mother.

Through night-time feeds and painful boobs, Sam retains her quirky sense of humour; superb intuition when it comes to approaching and eliciting useful information from people; and refusal to back down when DI Johns is being unreasonable at best, obstructive at worst, and loud and obnoxious either way. She also continues to have heart-warming catch-ups with her best friend, Maggie.

While the crimes Sam investigated in Expectant were brutal and shocking, the rather less graphic murders (both victims were stabbed just once, with Mark subsequently falling down the cathedral steps) and historical nature of this case make Prey a less urgent, more character-based story, demonstrating Symon’s range as a writer.

And what an interesting bunch of characters they are! Through her interviews with Mark’s family – as well as daughter Felicity, there’s wife Yvonne and son Callum – Sam discovers a tangled web of secrets that they’ve kept partly to protect one another, and partly from shame. As she frequently laments, events might have unfolded very differently if they’d just communicated with each other.

This is part of a wider theme: the hypocrisy of the Church. While Mark is remembered fondly by his parishioners, as the children of a priest, Felicity and Callum were under immense pressure to appear squeaky-clean, and couldn’t even talk to their parents about common teenage issues.

Following Mark’s death, meanwhile, his colleagues took the opportunity to push out two members of the church he’d seen potential and genuineness in, but they disliked and distrusted. This pair are Aaron Cox, a reformed gang member and addict who’d found God, and Mel Smythe, a youth leader who didn’t fit the the happy-clappy, platitudinous model.

Sam speaks to both, and like the members of the Freeman/Johns family, they’re revealed to contain multitudes. Mel has turned extremely bitter following her ejection from the church and is difficult to like, yet the stridently un-religious Sam nonetheless manages to give her more grace than she received from the Church following Mark’s untimely death.

Prey is full of twists, surprises, and interesting, complex characters.