Finished this as I had a lazy Sunday morning in bed.  This is book 5 in the Ellie Hatcher series.  I have read one other in this series so I am someone familiar with the characters, but I have not read them all in order to know the entire back story.

Ellie is tasked with investigating a conviction that is being reopened due to new evidence.  The case is very public being it relates to a serial killer and the original cop who closed the case is a local legend.  Ellie finds herself pitted against the attorney for the convicted man and her team, which includes a young woman who just happens to be the half-sister of one of the original victims.

This is a well written mystery, with a myriad of twists and turns and characters who each have their own concerns and motivations leading to lots tension, suspicion, and leads in all directions.  With the exception of Ellie and her partners, you don’t really know who else to trust.  Well written mystery with great tension and good pacing throughout.  Works as a standalone although you probably will get more out of the personal subplots if you have read the series in order.

Telling Tales is book 2 in the Vera Stanhope series and is just such a great police procedural.  I started reading it while cooking Thanksgiving dinner and had such a hard time tearing myself away every time I had to stop to tend to some cooking.  Vera is her usual insightful, stodgy, and somewhat unnerving self.

In this mystery an old case that was thought to be solved is now reopened and Vera is brought in as a new set of eyes.  The death of young girl in the past is tied to the death of a young man in the current day.  The witnesses and survivors from the original case are brought back together and secrets and lies are brought to light through Vera’s digging.  Great writing, wonderful sense of place, intricate plotting of the mystery, and well drawn characters, Vera is one of my favorite detectives.  Highly recommended read!!

I See You is  what I guess would be a domestic thriller.  Zoe finds her picture in the personals, only she didn’t put it there.  She then sees a pattern with other women’s pictures and crimes that are occurring.  The sense of menace gradually builds as the story winds its way through Zoe’s life.  The crime has a very modern feel with the cyber crime hook and the liberal use of CCTV.  The writer gives you glimpses into the villain’s thoughts with journal type entries that are inserted between chapters.  They are well done, short enough that they don’t disrupt the flow of the book and  vague enough that they do not give away the resolution.

The book has a great sense of tension that builds throughout, great red herrings, and a twist at the resolution that is very well done.  Good pacing, a quick read that I finished in one sitting.

  Finished this on my Kindle last night, to be honest I don’t even remember when I bought it or why.  Might have been recommended to me or I may have just read about it on a blog.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I liked the detective, Harry Cull, retired from the police force due to a personal tragedy and now working as a freelance investigator mainly in the field of interrogation and lie detection.  Harry gets a call from a state trooper who is investigating a murder in rural Pennsylvania and intrigued, Harry takes the case and we get plunged into life and death in the small town.

The relationship between Harry and his state Trooper friend Cirba is engaging and fun with lots of banter and obvious deep friendship between the two.  I think that the characterization of the victim is actually the strongest point of the book.  We really get to “know” Bill, who he was before he was a body in the woods, what motivated him, who loved him and who he loved.  For a victim who is dead within the first couple pages, he has a strong emotional impact.  I really wanted to see his killer punished.

The book explores fracking and the impact on a community and the environment as a major plot point and I found that interesting and more than a little scary.  A side plot involving a teen environmental warrior added humor and felt very current.

The weakness of the book was in the resolution, I think it was a bit of a stretch.  I will say that it might just be me, I’m not a huge fan of organized crime storylines.  Overall a solid mystery read.

  This is book 5 in the Inspector Lynley series.  I have watched the entire series on TV and am now working my way through the books.  I love the characters in this series, Lynley and his sidekick Havers, Helen, and St. James and they are all here in For the Sake of Elena.

This outing in the series involves the murder of a university professor’s d(D)eaf daughter, the Elena of the title.  As the case unwinds it involves infidelity, Deaf culture, parental alienation, and the nature of inspiration or creativity.  As the case goes on there are subplots involving Lynley, Helen, and Helen’s sister’s postpartum depression and Haver’s dilemma about her aging mother’s care.  The storylines are written sensitively and add depth as the character’s grapple with these issues.  Another great book, in a series I really enjoy.

A Pretty Place for A Murder is a book I picked up because my local used book shop was culling mysteries, so I found it in the culled books.  I have never heard of Roy Hart or his sleuth, Superintendent Roper, but I am really impressed.  Set in the “pretty” village of Cort Abbas, which the local heirs to the manse are turning into an attraction for artistic types,  there is a lovely, engrossing sense of place and village life in the late 70s,  This is not a thriller, it is a solid police procedural with attention to the details.  The driving strength is definitely in the characterizations, From Jollyboy, the local copper to Roper the Superintendent brought in on the murder investigation, the main characters are all very well drawn.  These are not cardboard cutout characters, there is depth and interest built into each one.  I’d highly recommend for fans of P.D. James or if you like police procedurals.  I’ve already put the first in this series on hold at my library.

As an aside, I cannot find any information about Roy Hart, mystery author.  There is no biography that I can find online.  I don’t even know if it is a pen name or his actual name.  I’d love to hear more about him, so if you know something let me know in the comments.

Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land is this month’s read at the Kindle English Mystery Book Club on Goodreads.   There is not really a mystery here, it is more of a psychological thriller.  There are some dark themes explored here, child sexual abuse, child abduction, torture and murder, mental illness and the impact of trauma on a child.  The book is told from the point of view of  Milly/Annie, the child of a serial child killer.  I can’t really talk much about the plot without giving things away, so I’d just say that I pretty much saw where the book was heading early on.

I did find the themes interesting and the portrayal of a victim of childhood trauma was well done.  As was the psychologist character, Mike, who couldn’t deal with the dysfunction in his own family.  Classic, the shoemaker’s children have no shoes…  All said it dragged a little while I was waiting for something to happen in the beginning, but once events were set in motion in ended nicely tied up.

By the way, The Kindle English Mystery Club is available here on WordPress, https://kindlebritishmysterybookclub.wordpress.com/  as well as on twitter as @KindleCrimeClub, and Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/48703-kindle-english-mystery-book-club

Work has been insanely busy but I have managed to get in some reading.

I am working my way through the Morse books by Colin Dexter and this, The Wench is Dead, is number 8 in the series.  This was an excellent Morse book, focused on Morse’s declining health, due to his rampant abuses of his body.   Morse is hospitalized and becomes fascinated with a 100 year old murder case and investigates from his hospital bed.  Very much an homage to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time in which her Inspector Grant is laid up in hospital and investigates Richard the III.

Morse is as always an unapologetic character with a keen mind and a talent for investigation.  He would have been a gentleman detective type from an earlier age with his snobbery, penchant for opera and literary references.  Long suffering sidekick Lewis appears here as frequent visitor to Morse, but the book is focused mainly on Morse himself.  Really well done and engrossing read.  I can see why it won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel.

I am beginning to feel in the holiday spirit already and so I picked up Quiet Murder from my local used bookstore purely based on the cover.  It is part of a series which I have not read or even heard of before.  The story is centered around the torture and murder of an old age pensioner, indeed most of the characters are old age pensioners from the same area of London.  It is refreshing to read  a book in which the aged are not just sitting by the fire or needing protection from the evils of the world.

There are lots of interesting elements here, references to war crimes, theft of Jewish assets during the war, fate of the elderly poor, and the interaction between Mavis and GDH Pringle.  And I certainly didn’t solve the crime before the reveal.  I just felt that it lacked some suspense or tension to keep the reader turning the pages.  A quiet, cozy mystery with dark themes (torture, war crimes).

Poison Parsley by Anna Clarke was another impulse purchase.  I like to find American cozies with themes I am interested in since you often tend to read as much about the theme as the mystery.  This is about herbology and for the murder part, natural poisons.  The parts about the plant life and the dangerous plants around us was really interesting and well done.  I just found the relationships between the characters hard to take, Rosalind and her son Martin, Bernard and Jane, Jane and basically everyone else.  Some of the characters were one-dimensional and it made it difficult to get involved in the story.

Deadly Lies is this month’s bargain book over at the Kindle English Mystery Book Club.  There are times that the writing seems a little awkward or perhaps just doesn’t seem to flow naturally, however I felt the plotting was well done and the storyline was engaging and kept my interest.  The writing of the main character, Anna Barham, was a particular strength of the book.  The writer was brave enough to write a character who many people would find issue with and yet she did so unapologetically.  There is no overused characterization here of a drug or alcohol dependency issue, rather Anna simply has abdicated responsibility in a way that some might find cold-hearted,  in the pursuit of career success. I found this well done, maybe because I know people IRL in this situation.

I also found it interesting that the author has gone against the current trope of the autistic savant that seems to be prevalent in crime fiction and has instead given us a darker look at autism and the impact on a family.  While I wouldn’t say this was on the level of a PD James or Colin Dexter, there is still enough here to make this a decent bargain read.