An old friend found me on Facebook a few days ago and we chatted for a couple of hours about all sorts of things - including books. She was an English professor at the place where I now teach, and I took a number of very entertaining courses from her - we did Jane Austen one semester, all of Jane, and then there were the murder mysteries. And am not sure that we actually did a course - but I did do a paper for presentation on "the little old ladies." This is not a little old lady mystery and it is about as "uncozy" as they get.
The book is billed as a "Simon Serrailler Mystery," but Simon is hardly the central character, even his sister Cat spends more time on stage than Simon does. Simon is a DCI in a small town somewhere in England. I don't know British geography well enough to recognize the implications of various regions. The madman serial killer is right out there the whole time - and I did figure out who it had to be about halfway down. The story revolves around a young female detective sergeant who becomes not-quite-obsessed with several disappearances - then (I suppose this is a seriously major spoiler) the writer kills her. I was pissed. It seemed unnecessary to me, there was plenty of creepy perversity to serve any number of purposes without that. By then there was no more mystery left, they knew who they were after. It seems a terrible waste of a well developed and interesting character, a character that it is easy to like and care about.
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