Claire McNab wrote about 30 mysteries between 1988 and 2007, and I thought I’d read them all until Emacs told me I’d missed this one.
These books are decidedly old-fashioned: The detective isn’t an alcoholic or anything, and doesn’t have a traumatic background, and there’s no scenes of prolonged torture in these books, and they’re all pretty short (under 200 pages). But on the other hand, these aren’t “cozies” (*shiver*) either.
And this is OK. There’s a spate of mysterious deaths, and Our Hero investigates, and that’s it. I think you can see that perhaps she’d lost some enthusiasm for the series (the next year she’d launch a new series of funnier mysteries) by this point, but it works fine.
I think McNab was right to think about ditching this series — only 66 ratings? That’s not a lot, so I guess it sold very badly. Let’s see how the first book of the new series (published the next year) fared…
Yeah, that’s what I’d have guessed.
Blood Link (2003) by Claire McNab (buy new, buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)