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My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

The last thing she needed was to display her weakness to a man even more senior and even less sympathetic than Jude, and Detective Superintendent Groves not only ticked those unwelcome boxes, but he also had a habit of running his eyes over her like a farmer deciding how much to bid for a prize heifer. Word in the office was that Groves was counting the days to his retirement, but he wasn’t counting them nearly as enthusiastically as his junior, female colleagues.

Violet Ross was a hundred years old and lived in a nursing home, so Klemmie really shouldn’t have been surprised. That said, the old woman had always given the impression of someone who would, if it were possible, live forever because she couldn’t bear to miss a tiny piece of someone else’s business by dying.

In her experience the dead so often looked peaceful, but Violet managed to look outraged, as if she’d fought death all the way and he’d only defeated her by foul means.

She shook her head, and the string of jet beads around her neck rattled beneath her accumulated chins.

She took a second, as she sometimes did, to think about the might-have-beens. Society needed people like Jude, high-minded seekers after justice. It was a pity they were so hard for ordinary people to live with.

 My Review:

I have greatly enjoyed Ms. Allen’s deft writing style, her compelling storytelling unwinds slowly while she shrewdly sucks the reader in with lots of juicy and cunningly observant ancillary details about the various players whether they be primary, secondary, or briefly making an appearance.   Being relatively new to the suspense genre, Ms. Allen has proven to be a rather clever minx with this curiously enticing series as the crimes themselves have been confounding and rather difficult to solve, leading me to devise and cast aside several theories while ultimately admitting defeat as I was unable to ferret out the correct combination or sequence of events. Jo Allen has made my list of favorite new talent to watch.