What Doesn’t Break Us by Helen Sedgwick

Take a sip and enter the world of the dead...

As the station prepares to close down for good, DI Georgie Strachan is running out of time to find out what is really going on in Burrowhead and put a stop to it. A deadly drug appears in the small Scottish village, best consumed with the blood of a freshly slaughtered animal. But what does this have to do with the deaths and suicides? And who is responsible for supplying it?

As rituals and threats reach a frantic high, no one wants to speak. It seems the drug is ingrained in the very fabric of the village. Suspects abound as Georgie questions who she can really trust.

About the author

Helen Sedgwick is the author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season, which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year in 2018. The opener to her Burrowhead Mysteries crime trilogy, When the Dead Come Calling, was published in 2020, followed by Where the Missing Gather in 2021. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Before she became an author, she was a research physicist with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Review

Wow, what a stunning and chilling conclusion to the Burrowhead trilogy. This series is so extremely well written that it is now placed in my best Scottish fiction of all time category. Helen’s writing is unnerving, her characters flawed but real, and the story is haunting, captivating and offputting at the same time, her supernatural components breathe through her words feeding the goosebumps that plague the reader. Essentially this is a perfect combination of elements to make an epic tale that I will remember for a very long time to come!

Burrowhead police station has been told it is finally being closed down and Georgie is running out of time to find out what is going on in the village. After some of the youth of the village partake in a night of drugs with horrible consequences, Georgie and the team are under pressure to find out who is supplying the drug. It is then linked to a previous case - the suicide of Pauley and Rachel. Plus there are the historic deaths of Abigail and others to investigate and of course the strange behaviour of the village in general.

I rarely advise people that they NEED to read the previous books but in this case you have to. This is one story split up over three books and there is so much backstory in the previous two that you can't truly appreciate the specialness of this series unless you read the three together.

I loved how the story all came together and how the resolutions for my beloved characters felt right! I'm not going to be able to talk about what happens without giving spoilers but I think loyal readers will close the last page and be happy. I knew I certainly was and would happily still read even more about them if there was that possibility. But alas! We have concluded this story and I am hungry to see what Helen does next. Hopefully we won't have too long to wait…