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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