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.