Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie

Here's a surprise - this time I had figured out who the murderer was - or at least who it ought to be. He was the only character who totally deserved to be the murderer. I also had guessed early on who the victim was going to be, the current victim, that is. There were others, going back over twenty years.

And the surprise connection in this book was the central position of Duncan's ex-wife and her son, but it turns out that Vic is a pretty decent person after all - as long as she isn't married to Duncan. Even Gemma likes her.

I trouble with time frame on this one. The precipitating events seem in the telling to be in the long past, but it wasn't all that long past. The dead poet died only five years in the past of the story. Her birthday is the same day as mine - and only a few years earlier. I guess all the discussion of her obsession with Rupert Brooke kept distracting me from the actual period of the back story. I don't remember quite so much silliness associated with the sixties - but I wasn't at Cambridge and I suppose college life at a small town cow college shouldn't be compared to such exalted heights.

It is hard to believe that a girl from deep in the heart of Texas writes with such authority in an British setting. I wonder how her stories go over in England. The end notes say that they sell well there. I once read a novel by a mystery writer who set his stories in my home area. I have seldom been so outraged by a piece of fiction. Maybe Crombie does legitimate research.