Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing by Gabrielle Lord

Publisher's Synopsis

Gemma Lincoln, who last featured in Feeding the Demons, is trying to discover who has been raping and murdering street girls from Kings Cross. Parallel cases follow the suspicious death of a high profile Sydney businessman and philanthropist, and an utterly ruthless drug dealer whose hobby is maintaining a small zoo of poisonous snakes.

In addition to these enquiries, Gemma has to contend with sabotage from within her own small organisation and pangs of jealousy over boyfriend Steve, whose own undercover work involves getting up close and personal with an extremely beautiful society woman. How much is Steve acting a role and how much is he really involved with the woman? Always haunted by the insecurities of her past, Gemma struggles to pull her life together in increasingly sinister circumstances.

As always, Lord combines her up-to the-minute forensic knowledge with storytelling skills, which keep the reader glued to the page.

My Review 

This is a fast-paced thriller that quickly moves from initial investigation to heart pounding frantic conclusion thanks to a very important, yet rarely used by most authors, fact. As a busy businesswoman, Gemma Lincoln is required to work on more than one case at once. Often when reading private investigator stories you find that the protagonist has the luxury of working a single case. Not so here with Gemma personally handling 3 cases and helping her employees with a couple more, it's full on action all the time. Add to this a crisis in her personal life and a further crisis professionally and it's a wonder she isn't checked into hospital to treat a stress related ulcer by the end.

The story opens with the latest in a series of prostitute bashings about to take place in Sydney's Kings Cross. The police aren't knocking themselves out trying to investigate, so a brothel owner and friend of Gemma's asks her to help. It amounts to highly dangerous work, involving Gemma offering herself up as bait and leaving the real possibility of allowing herself to become the next victim. Anyway, that's how Gemma plans to spend her nights.

By day she's working on her second case which is the investigation of a fire that had burnt down a millionaire's holiday home...possibly with the millionaire inside. The client is the millionaire's wife and it doesn't seem to matter whichever way Gemma cuts it, everything points to the wife. It's a very unusual case because of the extreme heat generated in the fire, hot enough to vaporise the steel girders and turn the cement slab flooring to glass. Out of all the subplots in the story, I found this one the most fascinating thanks to the unusual circumstances surrounding the fire and the attention to detail Gabrielle Lord gave to describing all aspects of the investigation.

Finally, Gemma is hired by a man, in what appears to be a straightforward surveillance job on his wife, whom he suspects is having an affair. But just lately, there's no such thing as straightforward for Gemma Lincoln. Somehow she has to fit the surveillance hob in with the rest of her work, but her attention is constantly distracted by a computer problem that just won't seem to go away.

A big factor in Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing is the question of trust. It's something that is gradually eroded as Gemma gets hit with crisis after crisis until around three-quarters of the way through she has no idea who is a friend and who is an enemy. This then spreads further until she begins to suspect clients, employees and even loved ones in a paranoid frenzy. It's a fascinating disintegration of a person with no clue of whether she will be able to survive it.

Gabrielle Lord has created an extremely intricate thriller with subplots weaving in and out of the central story all contributing to keep her protagonist off-balance. It's a frantic story that is more than just an explosive thriller, it's an emotionally harrowing experience that achieved an ending that I find all too rare - unexpected outcomes in which I delighted.