I really enjoyed the first book in this series about DC Smith, a brilliant veteran cop near retirement age.

But For The Grace is #2 — and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

The writing is skillful, with some dry British humour.

But DC Smith himself was not nearly as likeable.

DC Smith is assigned to the suspicious death a woman who lived in a retirement home. DC is masterful in his interview techniques.

One theme is assisted suicide which is still illegal in the time of the book.

It’s a good book but not a great book. The ending, in particular, I found disappointing.

Joe Pickett novel #12.

Finally.

A book featuring fan favourite antihero Nate Romanowski.

In 1995, Nate was in a secret black-ops Special Forces unit abroad when his commander did something terrible.

Now high up in the government, his commander is determined to eliminate anyone who knows about it, and Nate knows exactly how he’ll do it—by striking at Nate’s friends to draw him out.

The 10th novel in the Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett series.

Possibly the best, so far.

Astonishingly, the bad guys are based on a true story.

It’s Joe Pickett’s last week as a temporary game warden in the mountain town of Baggs, Wyoming, but his conscience won’t let him leave without checking out the strange reports coming from the wilderness: camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered.

What awaits him is like something out of an old campfire tale, except this story is all too real-and all too deadly.

cjbox.net

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Best Cork O’Connor book, so far.

When a high school student’s body is found and her boyfriend goes missing, tough-as-nails former sheriff Cork O’Connor is forced into the center of an eerie mystery with a shocking twist ….

… all evidence points to her boyfriend, local bad boy Solemn Winter Moon.

Despite Solemn’s self-incriminating decision to go into hiding, Cork O’Connor isn’t about to hang the crime on a kid he’s convinced is innocent.

… And when Solemn reappears, claiming to have seen a vision of Jesus Christ in Blood Hollow, the mystery becomes thornier than Cork could ever have anticipated.

And that’s when the miracles start happening.

williamkentkrueger.com

I’m well into the Wyoming Game Warden Joe Picket series.

Book #9 is Below Zero. I’ve enjoyed them all — but this one is best so far, for me.

The bad guys are ecoterrorists. And they have Joe’s foster daughter, April, who he believed to have been killed in an explosion 6 years earlier.

Sometimes titled Extraordinary People.

Peter May is a good writer.

This book reminded me a bit of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, a scavenger hunt for clues to a murder.

In this book, half-Scottish, half-Italian Enzo MacLeod used to be one of the top forensics experts in Scotland, and now he lives in Toulouse, working as a university professor.

Divorced in Scotland and widowed in France, he has an estranged Scottish daughter and a French daughter he has raised by himself.

Enzo foolishly enters into a bet that he can solve the cold case of a murder (disappearance?) 10 years past.

He follows a series clues deliberately left behind by a killer.

The first half of the book I found entertaining with many surprising and quirky situations. But ultimately it’s hilariously over-the-top. A bit embarrassing for such a skilled wordsmith.

The even bigger problem for me is Enzo MacLeod himself. Quick to anger. Quicker to drink. He’s an unlikable jerk. And not as smart as he thinks.

I might carry on to the second book in the Enzo Files Series.

Possibly the best in the series, so far.

Blood Trail (#8)

Game wardens have found a man dead at a mountain camp-strung up, gutted, and flayed as if he were the elk he’d been hunting.

Is the murder the work of a deranged anti-hunting activist or of a lone psychopath with a personal vendetta?

CJBox.net

This is another well written, interesting British murder mystery.

What I liked best is the lead — Detective Sergeant Smith. Now a widower, his superiors expect him to retire and enjoy his pension.

But Smith wants to stay on. He’s excellent at his job. And very funny in a subtle way.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. …

The latest trainee detective to work with him is the son of a member of his former team, and together they begin to unravel the truth about what happened to Wayne Fletcher. As the investigation proceeds, it becomes clear that others are involved – some seem determined to prevent it, some seem to be taking too much interest.

In the end Smith operates alone, having stepped too far outside standard procedures to ask for support. He knows that his own life might be at risk but he has not calculated on the life of his young assistant also being put in danger.

petergrainger.com

I read this murder mystery because it was set in Oxford. The crime on a narrowboat.

Murder on the Oxford Canal is the first in a series featuring CID DI Hillary Greene.

I believe the plot has a lot of twist and turns. They failed to interest me much.

I was even more turned off by the barrage of (mostly negative) comments about the looks of the female characters.

So … for me this book is a #fail.

The 4th book in the series featuring Joe Pickett, Wyoming Game Warden.

…Joe Pickett is fly-fishing with his two daughters when he stumbles upon the mutilated body of a moose.

Whatever—or whoever—attacked the animal was ruthless: half the animal’s face has been sliced away, the skin peeled back from the flesh. Shaken by the sight, Joe starts to investigate what he hopes in an isolated incident.

Days later, after the discovery of a small herd of mutilated cattle, Joe realizes this something much more terrifying than he could have imagined.

Local authorities are quick to label the attacks the work of a grizzly bear, but Joe knows otherwise.

The cuts on the moose and the cattle were too clean, too precise, to have been made by jagged teeth. Are the animals only practice for a killer about to move on to another, more challenging prey?

Soon afterward, Joe’s worst fears are confirmed. The bodies of two men are found within hours of each other, in separate locations, their wounds eerily similar to those found on the moose and cattle. There’s a vicious killer, a modern-day Jack the Ripper, on the loose in Saddlestring—and it appears his rampage is just beginning.