2011 thriller, second of this ongoing series; translated from the
original German by Rachel Ward. A new client brings Nea a complicated
multi-stage puzzle…
Though if you've read the first one, the first question will be
"where is Emily", and it turns out the great love that ended the first
book was just a thing and now a few months later it's over. Which,
fair enough I guess, but to have something as significant as that
happening outside described time feels as though it's breaking one of
the conventions of this kind of series.
Anyway, as before, there's lots of daily life and relationship drama
in among the other stuff. The other stuff this time is caused by the
client's deceased grandmother, who set up a complicated puzzle to hide
something extremely valuable for her granddaughter, but forgot to
write down the clues. Which I guess makes more sense than "ancient
puzzle left lying about for no particular reason and ignored until
now"…
There's a good action sequence in New Mexico, but after that the
dashing round the world looking for hidden clues gets outsourced to
local talent (budget doesn't seem to be a concern, or all PIs are
happy to do favours for a fellow professional). There are multiple
factions after the MacGuffin, and they have interestingly different
approaches, though its eventual location seems as though it really
ought to have been found by some of the searches that had already
happened there.
We get a decent bit of amateur cryptography, perhaps a bit less of Nea
being awesome than last time, but nothing one can regard as long-term
progress. This is categorised as a "lesbian mystery", but if that had
been why I'd read it I'd have been disappointed; yeah, there are some
lesbian relationships, but they felt to me much more in the sense of
"we are not religious fundamentalists so that's just one of the sorts
of relationship that's part of the modern world" than "this is the
special thing that's the point of the book".
If this had been the first one I read, I don't think I'd have been
enthused to read another.
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