Book Review - Casa Familia

Title: Casa Familia
Series: Tara Linders and Diego Martinez # 2
Author: Nathalie Pagie
 
Description: A survival weekend in the Belgian Ardennes seems the perfect opportunity for journalist Tara Linders to get to know her new colleagues better. But she hates survival and she's not at her best in groups. She prefers to explore the area on her own. For her partner Diego Martinez, the weekend is the perfect distraction from his problems at home; he throws himself wholeheartedly into the activities. When Tara gets involved in a brawl at the local pub, she meets a couple of unsavory types who obviously don't like peepers. What do they have to hide? And what's going on in the empty hospital in the woods? Tara and Diego go to investigate. The sinister discovery of a child's hand soon leads to Spanish Andalusia, where the mastermind behind the operation is hiding. Will Tara and Diego manage to find him before there are more victims?
 
Review: Journalist Tara Linders goes to a company outing to the Belgian Ardennes for a survival weekend. It’s meant to get to know her co-workers better, but Tara is a real loner and is not at all keen on spending a weekend with her colleagues. She only gets along with Diego Martinez, her regular partner in journalism. When Tara witnesses a brawl, she discovers that there is much more behind the argument. When she chases one of the men, she ends up in an underground warehouse where all kinds of animals have been stuffed. Not only does she find taxidermy animals there, but she also comes across a human hand. Tara decides to further investigate with Diego.
 
“Casa Familia” revolves around the journalist duo of Tara and Diego, who first appeared in “Birds of Paradise”. I had never read a book in this series, but it’s not a big deal if you didn’t. It’s easy to get in to this story without having the knowledge of the previous book.
 
The book has a steady pace and very short chapters. And the story is well put together. We start 10 years before the rest of the events in the book. What happened 10 years earlier continues to haunt your mind throughout the book and as a reader you try to discover if you can finds hints somewhere that will lead to the answers. With that fast pace and those short chapters, it’s sometimes hard to put the book away.
 
This sometimes has a downside though. Some problems the characters run into are solved a little too easily without a good explanation.
 
Overall, “Casa Familia” has become an excellent thriller that certainly has a very good and original story. Especially the two main characters give the book just that little extra that a standard thriller sometimes misses.
 
Rating: 4/ 5