To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming

This time she did one of those 24-hour numbers with practically minute by minute reporting. And within that twenty-four hours we had three deaths, one brutal beating, a kidnapping (actually, she was kidnapped at least three times), and a couple of fire-bombings. Clare was not seriously damaged this time, although she was present at one of the fire-bombings, and her Shelby Cobra was a casualty of one of the bombs. Old money, shifting economic base, big money closing down local businesses, jobs being lost, and a little long-standing insanity just to spice it up.

Featured an awful lot of death and general violence, murder and mayhem for a twenty-four hour period in a tiny little town. Kept it moving, though. She did a lot more switching between characters than in the previous three, not just from scene to scene, but point of view. It was never unclear whose thought process we were following at any given moment, but it did chop things up some. It was almost as if someone dared her to write a twenty-four hour mystery and she didn't have "time" in the narrative to let Clare and Russ discover everything. I hope she goes back to a more conventional narrative style in the next one.

As for the Clare-Russ situation, they have both acknowledged to themselves and to each other that they are in love - although in this book they barely even shake hands - well, there is that bathrobe scene in Clare's kitchen. Maybe Spencer-Fleming is trying to see how far she can take it without anything actually having to happen. Not much farther, I think, Clare may have found a confidante/confessor in the person of the Bishop's hatchet-man. And Russ has decided that he must tell Linda.

Makes me want to skip to the last book and see how far things have gotten. Almost. I always used to skip to the last few pages of a mystery - not so much to see whodunnit, but to see if the dog survived (metaphorically speaking). Kindle has about broken me of that habit, partly because if I go to the last page to check on the ending, I have to manually update the pages in my Kindle or on my computer desktop. The other part is that I can read so much more quickly in electronic format that I can stand to wait and read it out.