Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie

Publisher's Synopsis

Lexi Winter is tough, street-smart and has stood on her own two feet since childhood, when she was a victim of notorious paedophile the Spider. All she cares about now is a roof over her head and her long-term relationship with Jack Daniels. She isn't particular about who she sleeps with ... as long as they pay before leaving.

Lexi is also an ace hacker, tracking and entrapping local paedophiles and reporting them to the cops. When she finds a particularly dangerous paedophile who the police can't touch, she decides to gather enough evidence to put him away. Instead, she's a witness to his death ...

Detective Inspector Rachael Langley is the cop who cracked the Spider case, 18 years earlier - but failed to protect Lexi. Now a man claiming to be the real Spider is emulating his murderous acts, and Rachael is under pressure from government, media and her police colleagues. Did she get it wrong all those years ago, or is this killer is a copycat?

Lexi and Rachael cross paths at last, the Spider in their sights ... but they may be too late ...

My Review of Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie

Unforgiven is a thriller that introduces two strong female lead characters - Lexi Winter and Detective Inspector Rachael Langley and it gets off to a memorable start. Make no mistake, Sarah Barrie tackles dominant themes that are dark and confronting with an organised paedophile ring offering some of the worst kinds of criminal behaviour. But this is a story that is finely constructed and populated with some tough and admirable characters making the story compulsively readable.

Lexi has a body to dispose of - a paedophile who was murdered while she was upstairs, skulking around in his home office. Of all the rotten timing!

Somehow, regardless of the seriousness of the situation, the entire process of dealing with the corpse is given a virtual slapstick feel. In fact Lexi, along with the help of her elderly neighbour Dawnie, performed a double act in the early stages of the book that amounted to some quality low-brow humour.

“I like to think of myself as a bit of a tough arse…So it’s a little humbling to realise a senior citizen with a dodgy knee and a talent for making pies can manipulate a big, stinking body into a chest freezer and feel nothing more than a genuine sense of achievement, while my stomach lurches in all directions, close to passing out.”

Lexi Winter is the ultimate survivor. She was the victim of childhood sexual abuse but managed to fight back, protecting her younger sister and forging a life for herself. She’s still carrying emotional scars with a definite alcohol problem but, armed with crazy-good hacking ability, has been acting as an on-line vigilante bringing down paedophiles and other predators.

Detective Inspector Rachael Langley has made a name for herself catching and putting away a man known as the Spider. He was responsible for a horrifying series of murders, all of them young girls. There is a suggestion, however, that she may have caught and imprisoned the wrong man when she receives a phone call from someone purporting to be the real Spider.

And then, horrifyingly, he proves it.

The resulting murder investigation kicks off in Gosford with the same team assembled as the one that worked on the original Spider case. It’s an investigation that begins to draw in resources from whatever avenue that’s available. And that’s how slowly, ever so slowly, Lexi is drawn in - the work that she’s already done to pull in invaluable information about the local paedophile ring proving too much to ignore.

With the forces of both Lexi and Rachael combined the pace of the story increases rapidly. The task of identifying the killer before more victims fall prey to this new threat gives the story a definite sense of urgency. 

Sarah Barrie does a good job of presenting the present danger of the police investigation while also gradually drawing out the harrowing past in which both Lexi and Rachael have been deeply affected. She achieves the careful balance of revealing valuable information about both without confusing or interrupting the main storyline.

What was particularly interesting was the contrast between the two main characters. Whereas Lexi was highly dismissive of the controls, procedures and rules under which the police operated, preferring to simply Get. It. Done., Rachael was far more measured in her approach. The way each approached the job highlighted the background from which they came and, while it probably shouldn’t have worked, it somehow does.

I found Unforgiven to repeatedly hit high notes, compelling me on at an increasingly frenetic pace. I became fully invested in Lexi’s progress as she was allowed to display her developing investigative abilities. While the subject matter is confronting there’s no getting away from the fact that it smacks of real life in the twenty-first century. This has the hallmarks of the start of a notable series that will garner a substantial following as long as Lexi is permitted to fully express herself.