Keeper – Johana Gustawsson (Roy & Castells Book 2)

About the Book: 

Whitechapel, 1888: London is bowed under Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror.

London, 2015: actress Julianne Bell is abducted in a case similar to the terrible Tower Hamlets murders of some ten years earlier, and harking back to the Ripper killings of a century before. Falkenberg, Sweden, 2015: a woman’s body is found mutilated in a forest, her wounds identical to those of the Tower Hamlets victims. With the man arrested for the Tower Hamlets crimes already locked up, do the new killings mean he has a dangerous accomplice, or is a copy-cat serial killer on the loose?
Profiler Emily Roy and true-crime writer Alexis Castells again find themselves drawn into an intriguing case, with personal links that turn their world upside down.

Following the highly acclaimed Block 46 and guaranteed to disturb and enthral, Keeper is a breathless thriller from the new queen of French Noir.

About the Author: Born in 1978 in Marseille, France, and a graduate of Political Sciences, Johana Gustawsson was a journalist for television and French press. She now lives in London, England.

My Review:  I recently asked several book bloggers to tell me their Top 5 books of 2018 so far and Keeper kept appearing over and over again.  For those of you who follow my reviews you will know that I can’t read books out of order so I downloaded and read the first book in the series Block 46 yesterday (see my review here) and the second I finished it, I downloaded and started Keeper which I read in half a day.

You probably could read these books as standalone, but I like to get to know the characters properly and in chronological order and reading this book immediately after Block 46 meant that everything was fresh in my mind.

Once again the author has managed to create a truly disturbing and dark crime thriller based over two timelines, 1888 in Whitechapel, London and 2015 in London and Sweden.  With a truly sickening serial killer(s) on the loose in London and Sweden Roy & Castells team up together to solve the crime.

In Keeper we get to learn so much more about the 2 main female characters, the police teams in London and Sweden and the introduction of several wonderful new characters which brings an added layer giving the story more depth.

If you love crime that makes you wince and shudder, makes you turn each page whilst holding your breath and with gripping chapters which leave you unable to put the book down until you finish it, then you should definitely read this series.