RogerBW's Blog

It's Murder, My Son, Lauren Carr 21 July 2019

2010 cosy mystery, first in the Mac Faraday series. Just after his firing and divorce, homicide detective Faraday finds that his birth-mother went on to become a hugely successful mystery writer, who's left him everything in her will. So now he doesn't have to do anything but laze around… though his neighbour did get murdered recently, and the local police chief doesn't seem to be up to the job…

This is a strange book; I enjoyed it, but I got the feeling it was written to push specific buttons that I don't have. Clearly there's a lot of pipe-laying to establish the series regulars as well as to solve the immediate murder; OK, the dog Mac inherits has a plot-sensitive nose, but why does he also have to be fbzr xvaq bs fhcrevagryyvtrag zvyvgnel cebwrpg? An organised crime angle takes a sharp turn into fantasy with a famous assassin, complete with a trademark left on their victims. I found myself wondering at times just what sort of subgenre the book was meant to be in.

But it's fun. A pretty socialite has been murdered, and it turns out that an awful lot of people had good reasons to do it. Everyone is very obviously Good or Bad, classified by how they react to Mac, and one of the Bad ones is the killer; but they manage to be Bad in different ways.

There's plenty of wishful thinking here, and the identity of the murderer is very obvious. I think I'll probably keep the rest of this series for when I've finished Charlotte MacLeod/Alisa Craig, because they're a similar level of mind-candy.

Followed by Old Loves Die Hard.

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Series: Mac Faraday | Next in series: Old Loves Die Hard

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