The Perfect Victim by Corrie Jackson: Review

Husband, friend, colleague.... killer?

This is the second book featuring London Herald journalist Sophie Kent - I haven’t read the first, Breaking Dead, but you don’t need to in order to enjoy the second, though I probably missed out on a bit of continuity as far as the protagonist, Sophie, is concerned.

In the impressively accomplished The Perfect Victim, Sophie is grieving the untimely death of her beloved younger brother Tommy - a troubled young man, homeless, drug addicted - and struggling to uncover what really happened to him. Meanwhile, the drowned body of a lawyer is discovered and Sophie’s good friend and colleague, Charlie Swift, is implicated in her murder. Sophie can’t believe he could be capable of such a thing, but as  Charlie disappears and evidence begins to stack up that he is not the man she had thought him to be, danger comes frighteningly close to home. 

Then there’s Charlie’s social-media-savvy second wife Emily, who seems at times more intent on promoting her blog than finding her husband. But is Emily, too, all she seems?

Her investigations lead Sophie into the murky depths of Charlie’s past and the inner workings of a sinister religious cult. (Love a sinister religious cult.)

Deftly plotted and unpredictable, and at times very dark, this was one of those books which I really didn’t want to stop reading and could easily have finished in a day, were it not for pesky real-life responsibilities like going to work. Sophie is an engaging and satisfyingly complex heroine who definitely has some issues and doesn’t always make sensible choices, but also has tenacity and a toughness that belies her fragile exterior. Her brother Tommy’s addiction and mental health issues were, I thought, sensitively handled and realistically depicted by the author, and this was refreshing to see.

Corrie Jackson has created complex characters with a dark heart to their stories. Some way in, I did get a vague inkling of where things might be going with Charlie’s storyline - but it was very vague and the resolution was genuinely surprising.

All in all a brilliant read which certainly encourages me to seek out the previous Sophie Kent novel, and I will look out eagerly for more in this series in the future.

Corrie Jackson has been a journalist for fifteen years. During that time she has worked at Harper’s Bazaar, the Daily Mail, Grazia and Glamour. Corrie now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut with her husband and two children.