The Unquiet Heart by Gordon Ferris is a sequel to his Truth Dare Kill. The books are about Danny McRae, a damaged war vet who is etching out a living as a private eye. Set in 1947 London, this book didn’t have the dark noir feel that the first one had. The Unquiet Heart is more of a spy thriller, than a noir mystery. This jumping around of genres is perhaps why the author abandoned this series, and began again with the Douglas Brodie series.

Danny meets and falls in love with a beautiful reporter, but strange things seem to happen when she is around. When she disappears, Danny learns that during the war she was a double agent. Being Jewish, she had been forced to work for the Nazi’s in order to keep her family in Germany safe. She had double crossed the Germans by also working for the British. Upon learning that her family had been sent to the death camps, she was after revenge. He tries to follow and bring her back from Berlin, but she eventually disappears again having decided that her true calling is to go to Palestine and help establish a Jewish homeland.

The Unquiet Heart did tie up a few loose ends from the first book, but by the end, the author had written Danny McRae into a corner, but he has found a sort of peace within himself and I am quite happy to leave him to it and move on. ( )

"The Unquiet Heart" is the second in Gordon Ferris's Danny Macrae series, about a PI in post-war London. I was attracted to this series because of it's locale and time period, but UH didn't seem to quite match up to the first book in the series. The opening scenes of a warehouse bust are, well a bust. Too improbable in many regards. Our hero, Danny, has been hired by newspaper reporter Eve, who soon disappears. Danny is requested by some Brit spooks to fetch her back from Berlin because he knows her best and might have better luck finding her than MI-6, the CIA etc. And now we have a spy story, and a murder/revenge story, and a post-Holocaust story, and a bit of Israel settlement history. The story moves quickly, has some interesting twists, but nevertheless feels predictable particularly the last third. So, at best this is a somewhat disappointing 3 star. Will I read the next one? Maybe not, but Ferris also has written another series about a Glasgow detective? reporter? that I may check out (same post WWll time period). ( )