2023 mystery, fourth in its series. Pentecost and Parker are engaged
to look into the disappearance of an elderly woman with a photographic
memory.
And it's still interesting, but… it felt like hard going. There
are side issues which in a finer mystery would tie back into the
primary case (e.g. the solution to B gives an insight that helps with
A); but here they aren't, they're side stories which either peter out
or serve as setup for an ongoing thread across future books. I know, I
complain about mystery series in which each book seems like an episodic story and
the big multi-book plot elements are dragged out, and one of these side
stories does indeed advance things, but another one is essentially a
distraction from the main narrative.
The solution to the main mystery is found entirely by chance, and I
don't like that.
And then, once the main case is wrapped up, the book ends with a
cliffhanger and to-be-continued. Which feels cheap, like the old end
of season cliffhanger of a TV show so that the fans would whine if it
wasn't renewed.
There's a lack of trust in both directions between Pentecost and
Parker which might have sat better in the first book than in this one
when they've been working together for a while. Neither of them really
seems like a good fit for their personalities as previous books have
established them. Only one other character has anything in the way of
complexity, rather than uncomplicated good/bad, and that not much.
It's still competently written at the individual sentence level, but I
found it hard to love, not least because it felt so padded (though
it's not vastly longer than previous volumes). As I write, there's
been one more book published, and I'll probably read that, but if it's
on a par with this I doubt I'll remember to come back later and look
for more.