Dead on Demand was a free kindle book, that I decided to try.   The sleuth is DCI Morton and the murders involve an entire host of suspects connected in a web of deceit on the dark web.  The plot was intriguing as one murder led to the next with one “hand” not really knowing what the other was doing.  The initial trigger for all the crimes was the breakdown of Edwin and Eleanor’s marriage.  Their divorce has far-reaching consequences even beyond London.  DCI Morton is a capable investigator and there is enough of his personal life included to make him a fully fleshed out character.  I did find that with so much going on, the story felt a little rushed.  I also found that the post-resolution piece didn’t really ring true with what we had heard from Edwin throughout the book.  I think that could have been left off.  Overall, an okay mystery read.

The Missing Ones has been on my Kindle for quite  a while and I finally got around to reading it.  Detective Lottie Parker is a widowed parent of 3 teens, struggling with her grief, parenthood, and her job.  Of the three, she seems most successful with her work.  The storyline interweaves a crooked planning committee, a child abuse scandal involving the Catholic church ala Magdalen Laundries, and Lottie’s personal life. The pacing was well done, but the mystery felt like there was nothing new here.  I have read a few Irish Catholic church/Magdalen Laundries storylines in other series and there was not really anything new here.   I do like the character of Lottie and will probably read another in the series.

  This is the fourth book in the Einar series and I have not read the first three and don’t really know the whole story why Einar appears to have been exiled from Reykjavik to this much more isolated outpost.  Einar is a journalist and he falls into murder investigations through his work for the paper.

The voice of Einar is written somewhat strangely.  It took me a while to realize he was a man, there was just something about it that made me assume Einar was female.  The mystery is fine, although I didn’t like his decision about the resolution at the end.  The other characters are ok and even provide some comic relief.  By the end, I was drawn into the story, but it is not one of my favourite series.  I’m not sure I would read more in this series.

  I’ve had this on my bookshelf forever.  I’d heard such mixed reviews that I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it.  Cormoran Strike is an amputee ex-military man, who now has a PI firm.  On top of this, he is the illegitimate child of a notorious rock star.  Robin is referred to Cormoran through a temp agency, to work as a secretary/assistant.  They form a great team as they investigate the suicide of a supermodel, Lulu.  Cormoran and Robin are both great characters and coupled with an intriguing storyline, I could not put this book down.  This is not a thriller with car chases and lots of death-defying feats, this is more of an investigative mystery.  The reader follows Cormoran as he interviews all the people who touched Lulu’s life and follows up on the leads that Robin digs up for him.

I really enjoyed it and suspect that lots of people who rated it poorly were expecting more thrills and action ala Harry Potter and this is really quite different.  I am glad that I already own the next one and plan on reading it.

This is book 3 in the Kurt Wallander series.  Wallander is confronted with a seemingly normal middle class well-liked woman’s murder.  As he searches for a reason why she would be executed, connections are revealed to the South African political upheaval.  The book works back and forth between the South African plot and Wallander’s search fo the killer in Sweden.  He follows false leads and is confounded by the South African connections as they are revealed.  Eventually, the story lines are connected as Wallander follows the leads.  I enjoy this series, but this was definitely not my favorite book in it.  Quite a bit of the book was spent in South Africa and following the political upheaval that followed Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.  I will still continue with the series as I have liked the other books and the character of Wallander.

  This was a book that was recommended to me on a discussion in Goodreads related to cult themed Nordic Noir reads and I was fortunate that my library had it.

This book hooked me in immediately.  Loved the lead characters, Munch and Mia, and the newbie to their team, a hacker, who is just finding his footing in police work.  The characters are well-developed enough so that the reader can get into their heads, but without slowing down the pacing of the story.

The crime(s) involve six-year-old girls being abducted and killed.  A storyline with a local cult is occurring in tandem to this.  At the same time Munch and Mia are having issues in their personal lives.  All these intricate story lines thread together in the end along with a sprinkling of red herrings to keep the reader guessing.  This was a really good Nordic Noir read and I hope they continue to translate the series.

  I saw some reviews for this on Goodreads and decided to give it a try.  Set in Guernsey, it has a great deal of atmosphere and that closed in feel that a somewhat isolated, small community setting can give a book.  The protagonist, Jennifer, is an island girl, who left for a career in journalism and now has returned after her pursuit of a story went wrong.  She finds the body of a beautiful young woman on the beach and is unwilling to drop the story.   She shares her research with a local police officer, Michael, and then, as another girl is missing, it becomes a race against time.

There is a lot of tension built here and many red herrings.  I was convinced I knew who did  it and was completely wrong.  There are also references to Guernsey’s history of Nazi occupation and the impact that had on the community.  Themes of suicide, loss of a child, and obsession are explored.

The killer’s voice is heard in excerpts throughout the book beginning in his childhood and continuing up until the end of the book.  They give insight into his thoughts and especially his triggering (or motivating) event.  I enjoyed this thriller and would read more by the author.

Where Memories Lie is book 12 in the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James series, which I have been reading in order for a while now.   This is a much more Gemma-centric book, Gemma is called to her friend Erika’s house to resolve a WW II related case.  Erika is Jewish and escaped Germany with her husband.  Her father, a famous jeweler, was left behind and perished in the camps.  Gemma’s investigation into a piece of jewelry that has surfaced from Erika’s past, sets off a chain of present day crimes connected to past ones.  Gemma and Duncan get to work together on the interconnecting cases.  As well as dealing with the mystery and investigating the handling of past crimes, Gemma deals with a personal crisis in her family.  An on-point depiction of the push-pull that many working women face.

This was a good read in this series, which is best read in order as the characters grow and their relationship changes over the course of the series.  The ending left me anxious to read the next one and see what happens.

The Devil’s Wedding Ring is from a new to me author, Vidar Sundstol.  I saw this book mentioned on a discussion of cult themed stories in the Nordic Noir  genre, books like Sun Storm, The Hanging Girl, etc.  Max is the sleuth here, a man who in his youth was a police officer in Norway.  He left abruptly upon deciding he was not cut out for the type of police work being done and spent the rest of his life, some 30 years,  in the US working as a private investigator.  He returns to Norway for the funeral of an old friend and finds himself questioning everything about his friend’s death and connections to old crimes, including the one that drove him off the force and out of Norway.

Max is a well drawn character, a man who has lived a good life but now is returning to face the regrets of his youth.  Themes of religion, ritual, sacrifice, fertility,  and regret wrapped in solid investigation.  Nicely paced Nordic Noir read.

  This is book 8 in the Inspector Erlendur mystery series.  Themes of loss, regret, and secrets are weaved throughout connecting Erlendur’s personal life and relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, a series of old missing persons cases, and a current suicide.  Erlendur works mainly solo in this book as he is not really on an official case for the most part.  A woman has hung herself and it is found to be suicide, however Erlendur, at the prompting of one of the woman’s friends has to know why.  The area is the same as earlier missing persons cases, definitely cold cases but never closed.  Finally, his daughter is convinced that a meeting between Erlendur and her mother will resolve old issues and give her the family she is craving.

Really well done mystery with lots of interconnected stories and clues from one plot line to the next.  This is not really a traditional police procedural but more of a straight forward mystery.  Erlendur is a great character and stood well on his own without his team to interact with and assist with the case(s).

  Just finished this, the 12th book in the Inspector Morse series.  Such a bittersweet read, knowing what I know about Morse and that I have almost reached the end of the series.  I kept putting the book down to make it last longer.  Great character work is displayed in this depiction of Morse and in the “persons of interest” .   Morse’s bad habits are catching up with him and we see foreshadowing of what is to come.  The mystery is intriguing and it is really engaging to watch Morse and Lewis work through it, playing off of one another.  Strange also has a plot line here that is pointing to the 13th  and final book in the series.

The piece at the end brought me to tears and made me commit to rereading the series once I am done.  Very moody writing here, feelings of regret and melancholy tinged with some slivers of hope.  5 star read!

I have been a big fan of Peter May since reading the The Lewis Trilogy, a dark, moody series I loved.  This is a different setting and a very different type of book than those.  Sime is a Canadian Detective of Scottish descent, who must investigate a murder on an English-speaking island in a primarily French-speaking part of Canada.  He is unfortunately paired with his ex-wife on the case which is one source of tension.  The wife of the victim is the main suspect and immediately upon meeting her Sime feels a strong sense that he knows her.  His connection seems to deepen and the book connects back several generations to a tragic  love story, which had its roots in Scotland.  This is a murder mystery with a strong historical romance element and an almost fantastical feel with the “lovers across time” theme.

Both storylines were well done and as with The Lewis Trilogy, the writing is very atmospheric with a well-developed sense of place.  I am not generally a historical romance reader but I enjoyed this and liked reading about a time period and events which  I did not know much about.  Well written romantic mystery.  I am going to recommend it to my friends who regularly read historic romance because a lot of them are fans of the Outlander and other Scottish romance novels.  I think fans of those books would find a lot to like here.

White Bodies is this month’s read at the Kindle English Mystery Club.  This is a psychological “thriller” about twins.  Shades of Single White Female (the 80s movie) and Gone Girl are evident here although the author desperately tries to connect to the Patricia Highsmith classic, Strangers on a Train, instead.  Personally I think it is a stretch to compare this  to Highsmith’s writing.  Quite frankly, I think anyone who tries to compare themselves to Patricia Highsmith better be on point.

I can’t really say specifically what I didn’t care for here.  It just seems very Lifetime movie-ish and read like a YA book, lots of immaturity, self-absorption.  I had to hold myself back from skimming somewhere in the middle because it didn’t really hold my attention.  Themes of obsession, mental illness (NPD and Pica in particular), and deception abound.  Two characters that are introduced and are in quite a bit of the book, Wilf and Felix, don’t seem to be fully fleshed out.  Wilf in particular seems to just fill this “a girl NEEDS a man” purpose.

It seems to have quite good ratings, so  others saw something here that I did not or maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this.