Finally, I read the first in a new series instead of bouncing in at some point into it!

This is the first Maggie Blackthorne novel, and a terrific story it is. Sgt. Maggie Blackthorne finds a pair of ne’er do well brothers poaching a deer. She’s unable to bring them in, and intends to turn it over to the Fish & Game officer who shares the Sheriff’s Office space in the sparsely populated and large county that is their jurisdiction. Before she can do that, however, she receives a panicked call from one of the brothers that ends abruptly with a gunshot.

Blackthorne finally finds the location from which the brothers have called only o find both them and their dog murdered. Thus begins a rather engaging mystery, with a female main character who doesn’t feel the need to pretend to be younger than she is, or waste time looking in a mirror every chapter and fretting she looks any differently than she does. It’s rather refreshing, really.

She does have an abusive ass of an ex-husband who is also now her boss. He turns up a couple of times, but he works in another city and fortunately, we don’t have to see much of him. In the course of her investigation, it turns out a new man – someone she’s known for practically forever – has some romantic interest in her, and refreshingly, it isn’t a jump into bed on the first date sort of thing. Instalove just isn’t for me except in certain genres where it’s expected.

The investigation itself winds on, putting Blackthorne and her squad into contact with quite a number of possibly suspects, including some oddball man and his sons (and a couple of tough guys), who want to raise cattle naturally, an incapacitated patriarch, as well as a couple more dead bodies.

Blackthorne is dogged and intelligent, and the book finishes up well enough for me to look for the sequel.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Severn River Publishing and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Hailey McBride is sent to live with her aunt and her aunt’s husband Vaughn – a cop nicknamed Ice Man, who has a few (a lot) of dubious practices – after her father dies after going off he side of a mountain. She’s terribly unhappy about her father, about Vaughn, an obvious narcissist and controller of everything that goes on in the house. Hailey, for her part, wants nothing to do with Vaughn, but has to put up with his creepy uncle bit until she makes her escape with the help of Johnny, her friend and confidante, and fellow dirt biker.

All of this is set against the background of a very real, very current, and very disturbing backdrop: the disappearance of hundreds of missing Indigenous girls and women in Canada over a span of decades. Read up on the Highway of Tears for more information.

Prior to Hailey’s escape, she had befriended Amber, a waitress at the local diner. When Vaughn sees all the pictures of the two of them together, he predictably goes ape and forbids Hailey from going to the camp site at the lake, where most of the local kids hang out.

During Hailey’s escape, she sneaks over to look at a litter of puppies a farmer’s dog has had, wishing once more she could have had one at the house (Vaughn said no, of course). One of the puppies trails after her and will not leave, no matter how much she tries. So Hailey and Wolf wind up off the grid in an old and forgotten cabin. Johnny had stocked it in advance, and she and Wolf live off this, and what she can gather from the secluded area surrounding them.

She occasionally comes off the mountain, and horrifyingly discovers Amber, dead for a couple of days, at the lake. She calls it in anonymously, then waits, only to find Vaughn driving in and walking directly to where the body lies. She flees back into wild, and her section of the book ends when she and Wolf have to fend off a cougar, and Wolf is seriously injured.

The next part picks up with Beth, Amber’s sister. There’s a bit about their parents, who are decidedly religiously odd almost to the point of caricature, but soon we’re following Beth to Cold Creek, to see what she can find out about Amber’s death. The diner is down a waitress now, and she takes the offer of a job to work there. She runs into Vaughn fairly quickly, and gets the creep vibe from him, just as everyone else does.

To go further would be to spoil some excellent moments from the end of the book. I’ve also left out quite a bit from the beginning for the same reason. Vaughn is in fact quite creepy, and he has zero redeeming qualities about him, which makes him a bit of a one note villain. There are plenty of villains to choose from, though, and a number of heroes emerge as well.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to St Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the reading copy.

John Adderley, FBI agent and all around suave dude, helps take down a major Nigerian drug trafficking group, and then heads into witness protection after being shot. His mother, who lives in Sweden, sends him a packet containing information related to the arrest of his brother, also in Sweden, for the murder of a young girl. It’s a cold case, now, and his mother insists that his brother is innocent. Instead of sitting around, waiting for the case against the Nigerians to wind its way through the legal system – and petty much blackmailing his boss – Adderley heads to Sweden to look into the case of Emile, the subject of the cold case.

Generally speaking, I really do enjoy Nordic noir. This was….ok. The idea of it was good: guy born in Sweden is taken by his father to the US, joins the FBI, goes undercover to bust up a drug ring, then goes to Sweden, undercover again under another name, to help with a cold case. It’s rather unusual, but I can go with it.

The book switches between 2009 and 2019, telling the backstory of Emile’s murder, and Adderley’s progression from undercover FBI agent to undercover cold case investigator in Sweden. The first half is chocked with quite a lot of first date information: who Adderley is, who the people around him are, and the situations both in the US and Sweden. I expect this from the first book in a new series, so I won’t ding it for that.

I will, however, ding it for taking up the entire first half of the book. We don’t need to know every single little detail – the descriptions of everything take forever to get through, and the book doesn’t really pick up the pace until about the 60% mark (on a Fire tablet).

In addition, Adderley is supposedly scare of a Nigerian hi team coming after him and the other FBI agent who was embedded in the same cell. But he dresses in (impeccable) suits and drives an American muscle car all over the place while at the same time ensuring that people remember him due to the way he acts an how perilously close he comes to revealing that he has been in contact with his family,which is a no-no, per his new Swedish handlers.

More bodies pile up, and I will give give credit to the authors for having a number of suspects, all with motives that could cast suspicion on them to be the culprit. The real culprit, though, is eventually caught, and Adderley and his Swedish handler do an absurdly ridiculous thing with him and the dead girl’s father.

Overall, it’s a good enough read that I’ll put it down with three stars.

Thanks to Abrams and NetGalley for the reading copy.

The Bonds of Blood is book four in the DI Dani Stephens series. As is fairly usual for me, I have not read the first three; however, I had no issue piecing together what came before, and the book works fine as a standalone.

We open with a rather gruesome murder – the blood and gore is kept to a minimum, but we get the idea without it. A man and woman, killed in their bed in the dead of night.

DI Stephens is working another case when this one comes up: a man who beat another man to death after the second man ran over and killed the first man’s son while they were out biking. This issue – determining what level of intent was involved on the part of both men runs through the book as a subplot.

Stephens is then called out to the scene of the murder that opens the book. It’s a bit close to home for her, as she and her fiancee suffered a similar attack, but lived.. Still, she tackles the case with her team, and discovers that the murdered couple owned a development business, buying properties and creating new housing. As Stephens and her team delve more deeply into the business, they find that the company is burning through money. During the investigation, they also find a will, notarized and signed by a lawyer, and another will, unsigned and undated. The difference between them revolves around how much a portion of the business each of their four children receive.

Their kids are really somewhat of a mess. The daughter is married and they run a competing company in real estate development. One son is of course the one who is rather flighty and undependable. One son has a gambling problem, and owes a lot of money to an illegal gambling front that extended him credit. The last son works in the company business with the father, and is displeased with the way the company is being run and the money it’s losing on each project. All are good candidates for motive, and Stephens and her team sort through the entanglements of the family to get to the truth.

The book moves back and forth in time, and is told both from the viewpoint of Stephens and from the viewpoint of the father, Terry, as he goes through trying to keep his business afloat. This back and forth does not make the book hard to follow, but it does give the reader some vital information that will allow them to crack the case if they are observant.

I’ll give this a solid four out of five.

Thanks to Canelo and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Tom Winscombe is having a very bad series of days, although the title refers only to one. Perhaps it refers only to the first day,when a planned heist go terribly wrong.

This is book four in the Mathematical Mystery series, and although I have not read the first three books, it can work as a standalone on some rather shaky legs. I’d highly recommend reading the books in order, if only to become acquainted with Winscombe’s team and the relationships between them. While there are shot talks given that reference the first three, I believe reading those would have lent far more depth to the characters I was meeting for the first time.

That said, this book is of the madcap, how can things possibly get worse genre. Winscombe seems to be a bad luck magnet,first kidnapped in the above referenced heist, then sent into Belarus,then kidnapped by Belarus mafia types, and then standing on the top floor of a building that’s on fire,with a firefight of the gun variety going on below as well.

It was quite funny in places, and not as serious as I think it should have been in others, but that’s simply my preference in books in the mystery/thriller genre, and I can’t ding it for that reason, as the writing tells me this is just the nature of this particular beast, and the story knows what it’s doing.

Beyond saying that the first three books would be of immense help to read before this, I’m still giving it three out of five stars.

Thanks to Duckworth Books/Farrago Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

I love Ann Cleeves’ cranky old broad Vera Stanhope, so my expectations for this, the second in a new series, were high. I’ve not read the first one (will soon rectify that), but this works fine as a standalone.

The book opens at a party, with one of the officers who works for Matthew Venn – the primary character in this series – as a guest. Dr Nigel Yeo approaches the fairly freshly divorced Jenn, wishing to speak to her about what could be a police matter. He doesn’t want to give her the details, mainly because she’s drunk, but takes her number and says he will call.

The next morning, Yeo is found murdered in the glass blowing shop where is daughter does her work, with a shard of one of her creations in his chest.

Venn is called out to the scene, and soon gathers his team. He’s very thorough, with a quiet sort of command that I really liked. It’s inevitable that I’ll always compare this to the Stanhope books, but Venn is very different than Stanhope: her methods of drawing people out to speak works, but that sort of approach does not suit Venn, who was raised in a cult-like group called the Brethren. Where Stanhope is garrulous to the point of rambling, Venn often barely speaks. Where Stanhope often appears to be unorganized (but is not, it is simply her method), Venn is meticulous and orderly.

Yeo, it turns out, was looking into the suicide of a 19 year man, the son of the owners of a pub that a local philanthropist has helped bankroll. The parents and sister of that man were very angry with the handling of his case, and blame the local system for releasing him due to lack of beds because he did not see, to present himself as a danger. Thereafter, he committed suicide. Yeo was looking into this when killed, so the team looks into it as well.

Soon, other people are murdered, in much the same way as Yeo, and the team now has a serial killer and an ever growing list of people they have to look into for the crimes.

One ding from me would be the actual talking to all the people. There are more than a handful the teams talks to two or three times, where eventually we get more of their stories pulled out.

Meanwhile, Venn’s husband Jonathan tells him that he has invited Venn’s estranged mother to lunch, and this weighs heavily on Venn’s mind as he roves around, trying to untangle the web of suspects, their motives, and how they would have carried out their crimes.

As things race to their conclusion, it’s possible to determine the killer if one is paying super close attention, and the endgame for the capture of the killer seemed a little off to me. I won’t say more than that, as it would give away too much, but it seemed a tad forced and out of character. But it was plausible, at least, so I didn’t ding it for that.

This is not a fast book. While the murders and the investigation take up most of the attention, there is quite a lot of character-driven material in between, as Cleeves further draws out complete pictures for her primary group of characters.

Recommended, and four out of five stars from me.

Thanks to St Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the reading copy.