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A furniture store in South Wales suffers a minor payroll fraud. Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths is tasked with the investigation. She hates the assignment – no corpses – only then she finds the body of a woman who has starved to death and it becomes clear that within the first, smaller crime, a vaster one looms: the most audacious theft in history. Fiona’s bosses need a copper willing to go undercover, and they ask Fiona to play the role of a timid payroll clerk so that she can penetrate the criminal gang from within. Fiona will be alone, she’ll be lethally vulnerable – and her fragile grip on ‘Planet Normal’ will be tested as never before ...
Reviews
A payroll-scam investigation drives Bingham’s suspenseful third police thriller featuring Welsh Det. Constable Fiona Griffiths (after 2013’s Love Story, with Murders). The police have learned that a furniture superstore has been tricked into paying thousands of pounds to two women who didn’t actually work for the business. When Fiona tries to track down the phantom workers, she finds that one, the reclusive Hayley Morgan, has died under suspicious circumstances: someone drained Morgan’s bank account, and her recluse’s phone and electricity were cut off, leaving her to die. The inquiry into the fraud case goes nowhere, until Fiona’s bosses ask her to go undercover as a cleaning woman as a way of getting at the white-collar criminals running the scheme. For Fiona, living as a different person constitutes her second “strange death” after her traumatic abandonment as a child left her believing she was dead for two years. Fans of plucky, independent heroines will be pleased. (BookLife)
Oxford Times (UK)
"[The] complex criminal operation ultimately culminates in an explosive and suspense-filled denouement... Bingham's skill is in building up and dismantling a complex character who will never be rounded but still aspires to normality."
Sunday Times (London)
"[THE STRANGE DEATH OF FIONA GRIFFITHS] confronts the reader with profound questions about human nature in the midst of a fast-paced plot."
Western Mail (Wales, UK)
"A series that started strongly but is definitely getting even better... Bingham has created a unique character, not Wales' answer to Rebus but better in a number of ways."
