6. The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett

David Hunter moved to the small English village, Manham, to escape his life in London. He lost his wife and daughter to a car accident and gave up a promising forensic career to become a rural doctor in Manham. Three years after his arrival, David is still seen as an outsider – until a body of a local woman is found in the woods horribly mutilated and dead for weeks. When the local police find out David was once an expert in analyzing human remains to find time of death, he reluctantly joins their search efforts. When another body turns up mutilated, and another woman goes missing – this time the woman David has just started to date – David realizes that things are not what they seem in the small town.

I was slightly disappointed with this book. I had originally read about it in various journals we use to order our books for the library, and it had gotten very good reviews. The problem I had was David was just a not very likeable character and seemed not to be fully developed yet. Also, the animal mutilation (and there are numerous instances of it) bothered me. Beckett has another Dr. Hunter book coming out in September that sounds very good, and I will definitely give that one a try.