A Killing of Innocents

On a blustery November evening in Bloomsbury, a trainee doctor named Sasha Johnson collapses near the fountain in Russell Square. She isn’t drunk. She’s been stabbed—fast, precise, and fatal. Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, his wife Gemma James, and their tight-knit team find themselves caught in the hunt for a killer who leaves almost nothing behind, except a single, chilling question: why her?

When a second body turns up days later—a senior nurse found bleeding out beside the bins in Soho Square—the case tilts from random street violence into something calculated. DI Jasmine Sidana and pathologist Rashid Kaleem pick apart injuries that don’t quite match—a narrow tool, a practiced hand, and a pattern that points away from gangs and toward vengeance. As Gemma agrees to slip, off-duty, into a velvet-and-glass cocktail club to read the room from the inside, links surface between Sasha’s hospital, two downtown bars, and a young man playing with dangerous people.

Threads weave tighter: a doctor’s affair, a missing brother, an assault kept quiet, and an old medical disaster that never healed. The truth lives in the city’s shadows—behind the bar backlit with bottles, under the hard gleam of hospital lights, and in the quiet flat of a woman who makes clay come alive. What begins as a simple stabbing becomes a story of grief redirected, until Kincaid’s team corners a killer whose tenderest memories became a blueprint for revenge.

• Fans of character-driven British crime fiction with strong procedural detail
• Listeners who enjoy London as a living character in modern mysteries
• Readers of Tana French, Ann Cleeves, or Louise Penny who want a new series to sink into

Deborah Crombie is a Texas-born author who has lived in England and Scotland and writes the acclaimed Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mystery series. Splitting her time between the UK and Texas, she brings an eye for detail, richly drawn characters, and a deep love of London to her crime fiction.