The victim was Marion Garvey, a nightclub owner Malcolm had a few run-ins with back when he worked narcotics, although nothing stuck. When they arrive, it’s to find the dead man lying face down on a bed strewn with rose petals – and on the floor, just beyond the foot of the bed, a long, triangular kitchen knife. But the world – and crime – doesn’t stop just because they’re unaccountably pissed with each other, and they’re quickly assigned a new case – a murder at a luxury hotel. Malcolm is distracted and snappish and more irascible than usual, and Seong-Jae has no idea why – which, in turn, annoys him and makes him irritable, too.

Neither of them is dealing well with the emotional fallout of the Macallister case, and neither of them is prepared to open up or attempt to process it with the person most able to really understand what they’re going through – each other.

Junk Shop Blues opens about a week since the pair started working with each other – and things aren’t going well. I was completely hooked into Cole McCade’s long-running Criminal Intentions romantic suspense series by the time I’d reached the end of the first chapter of book one, so was chomping at the bit to get stuck into the next one! The Cardigans introduced listeners to two very different protagonists – detectives Malcolm Khalaji and Seong-Jae Yoon – and set up what looks set to be a very slow burn romance as well as telling a tense and exciting story of the investigation into the string of murders that brings them together.

Junk Shop Blues by Cole McCade