Read in 2025 - 27, 28

The following two reviews are both about works of crime fiction, each part of a series, but that's where the parallels end. 

One was a free ebook from Amazon's kindle shop, the other one a paperback borrowed from my book-swapping friend A (the one I was having the "Thursday Murder Club" evening with the other day). One was written by an Australian, the other by an American. They were originally published more than 100 years apart, in 1916 and 2023 respectively.

#27: The Hampstead Mystery

Arthur J. Rees

The wikipedia entry about the author doesn't say much about him as a person, but has a list of his works.

Sometimes I found the book hard going, not because it was complicated or in any way difficult to understand, but because of its sheer length and word-for-word repetition of conversations that weren't entirely necessary to bring the story forward.

Still, the case itself was interesting enough: 

A well-known Judge is found shot dead in his luxurious Hampstead home under mysterious circumstances. He was supposed to be in Scotland, hunting with friends; even his trusted butler claims not to know the reason for his unexpected return. He'd been a widower for many years and lived alone, but evidence points to a lady having been present at the time of his death.

Scotland Yard detectives Chippenfield and Rolfe are baffled, but it's not only vital for them to solve the case for the obvious reasons - they are also up against famous gentleman detective Crewe, employed by the victim's daughter, and the chase for the murderer turns into a race against time between them.

Who will first disentangle the web of relationships between the victim, characters from the underworld, servants, friends and lovers, and find out who really did it?

#28: Unnatural Death

Patricia Cornwell

The 27th book in the series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, I found this one gripping enough to keep going although I do not intend to seek out any more of the series. 

The author started the Scarpetta series in 1990, and I am pretty sure that the first one I ever read with this character at its centre was 1994's "The Body Farm". I quite liked it back then but never really followed up.

This recent story, only about 2 years old, references quite a lot from past books which I have not read; it is possible to read it as a standalone novel but probably better to stay within the series - or at least catch up with the fictional characters' biographies on wikipedia.

At the start of the book, Kay and her team are called to recover and examine the bodies of a married couple, wealthy owners of an outdoor equipment store, found dead near a site in dense woodland not accessible to the public where they had been camping for several month. Who had reason to kill them, and how did their murderer manage to get past their extensive security systems, not even showing up on camera although there was only one way to get to the camp site?

What annoyed me was the almost real-time account of events; the helicopter flight out to the woods is described so that every sentence Kay and the pilot (her niece) speak is followed by what they think and feel, what in their past has lead to them thinking and feeling that way, and what they are going to say and do next. 

Of course I understand that much of this was done to remind (or introduce) the reader about the characters' background, but there really was a bit too much of that in my opinion.

As with The Hampstead Mystery, the case itself was interesting enough, but the claim on the book's cover "Edge-of-the-seat, packed with twists" I can not confirm.

If any of you have been reading the Kay Scarpetta series, I'd like to know your opinion; I find that either my taste or the style of the books (or both?) has changed  considerably since I first read one of the novels in the 1990s.