Review - The Murder Trail, Leonie Mateer

The third book in the Audrey Murders series, THE MURDER TRAIL is set in a very picturesque location in the far north of New Zealand. Audrey owns a beautiful holiday cabin property perched on a rural mountain top. She's been unlucky in love and she's a serial killing psychopath.

Not having read either of the earlier books in the series, this reader relied heavily on the blurb to set up the scenario. From the psychopathic serial killer, through to the likelihood that this property is remote, and the whole drug cartel moved into one of the cabins bit. Pretty soon the sketchy information provided by the blurb wasn't answering quite enough of the questions that kept arising into Audrey's background, her behaviour and why a psycopathic serial killer is running a holiday resort in the first place. 

The central plot is a drug cartel hiding out on a "fishing trip" arranging for the collection and distribution of smuggled drugs from such a remote location. Audrey's spoiling of their plans is an interesting twist, but the whole romantic sidebar that springs from that didn't make a lot of sense (one would assume it's part of the backstory though). Because there are a lot of aspects to Audrey, and her location, that likewise aren't given any context here, but rather are what they are, it was hard to avoid the feeling that this is a series that you absolutely must read in order. (The Murder Suite / The Cabin by the Sea / The Murder Trail). Without them Audrey came across as an odd mixture of languid, almost passive psychopathy, threatening in some ways and strangly disconnected in others.