One for Sorrow by Helen Fields

Apart from personal issues, my country like a lot of other places has many issues. We are in the middle of an electricity crisis with upto seven and a half hours power being cut off and now on top of that we have no cooking gas. There is a scarcity of petrol and diesel and today prices of both have been upped. There is also a severe shortage of milk powder but that affects households who have children mainly. It is a very depressing period to be in Sri Lanka. The bright thing that happened to me personally is that my Australian visa came through after two years (due to closure because of covid) and for that I am grateful. When I can, I shall visit children and grand children. This story was a wonderfully twisted one. I could not imagine for ages that there was a corkscrew effect in who the perpetrator of the crime was. We are led by the nose as it were in one direction which is obvious as the young man was cocky, a psychopath and one with no regard for women at all. It was the end which was the denunciation and then like a domino effect the whole story was open to one's understanding. Brilliant writing. Very unconnected victims, but in the course of those victims dying they also took with them many others from the medical, the police and the emergency services. The total death toll was frightening and one that Edinburgh had not seen before. It was also a crime scene which the detectives had not dealt with before. Masterful story telling. Sent by Avon Books UK for an unbiased review, courtesy of Netgalley.