Molly, a homeless woman, leaves her precious bag at the library. It is packed full of papers with rather sinister notes written on them. The librarian passes the bag to retired cops Matt and Liz to sort through but, before they can start, Molly’s murdered body is discovered…
The Bag of Secrets is the sixth book in the Matt Ballard private detective and crime thriller series.
Matt and Liz have several cases on the go: shoplifting, a missing teen and now this mysterious bag. When they find out that Molly has been killed, they are asked by the police to help investigate as it isn’t a high priority. They are lumbered with working with a senior officer’s grandson who has a lot to learn about compassion and avoiding assumptions.
The mystery develops as it becomes obvious from the post mortem and information from other homeless people that Molly wasn’t quite what she appeared. This ties in with the bag of notes that the detectives sift through to make sense of the death. Meanwhile Matt is becoming increasingly worried about missing teen Liam.
The narration is in the third person. Most of the focus is on Matt and Liz but we also get chapters that show the other characters including unnamed people acting suspiciously with obvious secrets.
I really like Matt and Liz’s characters. There is a touch of gentle humour about their relationship and their love and respect for each other as well as the compassion they have for those involved in their cases are an important feature of the book.
The Bag of Secrets is an engaging crime thriller.
THE BAG OF SECRETS (Matt Ballard #6) by Joy Ellis
A GRIPPING NEW CRIME THRILLER FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND BRITISH BOOK AWARDS CRIME & THRILLER OF THE YEAR NOMINEE JOY ELLIS.
From three-million-selling author Joy Ellis comes the book that everyone will be reading this Christmas.
Matt and Liz may have retired from the police, but that doesn’t guarantee a quiet life.
An abandoned carpet bag full of mysterious handwritten notes. A body in a marshy lagoon.
Matt is intrigued when his partner Liz brings home an old carpet bag she found dumped in the local library. It contains a pile of mysterious handwritten notes. Liz is convinced the bag belongs to Old Molly, a local woman who lives on the streets.
The following day, a body is discovered in a marshy lagoon. It’s Old Molly. Suffocated with an expensive men’s handkerchief.
Molly clearly knew something that got her killed. Liz believes she was trying to tell them something important. She calls on her nephew David to help decipher the carpet bag notes.
Meanwhile Matt is hired to find teenage runaway Liam Cooper. Liam has been missing for ten days now, and Matt has a very bad feeling about him.
A few days later, a second body is discovered in an old barn out on the fens.
Matt and Liz must piece together the cryptic clues Molly has left for them before more people die. The answers lead to the remote fenland village of Marshdyke-St-Mary — and a series of shocking secrets stretching back many years.
DISCOVER A TOTALLY ENTHRALLING CRIME THRILLER.
This utterly gripping crime thriller is perfect for fans of L.J. Ross, Peter May, J.D. Kirk, Angela Marsons, J.M. Dalgliesh, Elly Griffiths or Ann Cleeves.
THE SETTING England’s rural fenland is a strange place, with its never-ending fields, winding tracks, and long straight droves (the old livestock routes) that lead to nowhere. The lonely lanes are flanked either side by deep drainage ditches and are, for a good part of the year, filled with tall, whispering reeds. Closer to the Wash, high seabanks form a barrier between river and marsh, and the richly fertile soil of the drained land. But when the mists come down, as they so often do, perspective is destroyed and all sense of direction lost, and then the fens become a rather frightening place of mystery and danger. Somewhere that you do not want to be at night.
UK #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE JACKMAN & EVANS AND DI NIKKI GALENA SERIES; SHORTLISTED FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR FICTION: CRIME & THRILLER AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021
OVER 3 MILLION BOOKS SOLD!
Joy grew up and lived in Kent, trained in floristry in Mayfair and ran her own highly successful floristry business in Weybridge for many years. In the mid-1990s, she followed her lifelong love of books, first as the manager of an independent bookshop in Leatherhead, Surrey, then as a writer. When she retired, Joy and her partner Jacqueline and their two spaniels settled in a village just outside Boston, captivated by the Lincolnshire Fens.
Joy’s happy home life is far removed from her storylines, however, and while she loves living in the misty Fens, the area provides a remote and eerie backdrop to her novels. Joy is also able to add the authenticity vital to any crime thriller by drawing on Jacqueline’s inside knowledge, to confirm procedures and the reality of tackling brutal crime and criminals in a modern police force.
