Kathy Kolla’s Puzzle Corner

I haven’t got past the opening page of this book yet. In the first paragraph Kathy Kolla is pondering a word puzzle. Make at least 130 words from the letters in “claim to dream”. I got to 130 but had to resort to “I, Rearrangement Servant” (aka Internet Anagram Server) to suss out the 12 letter word “melodramatic”.

[My comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers!]

[on the characters]

I’m not picking up any huge inconsistencies between the characters from book to book, Kolla and Brock both seem much as they have been before. I think there are inconsistencies in the narration though - Brock barely featured in this one (even less than he did in book one). I hope that there is more of Brock again in book four since I think that since we have two lead characters I’d like to see them both used.

I thought Aunt Mary(anne) was a good addition to the cast as she’s been mentioned in the previous books. I didn’t buy that Kathy took her in so easily though without trying to find out what was going on. It was good to learn more about Kathy’s background though.

The only other character that I think we’ve met before is Bren, but I barely remembered him. And like Mike I’m still waiting to find out what the blonde with the red sports car is to Brock.

Since our pair of detectives are now officially colleagues I expect we are going to see more recurring characters from now on in the series. I thought Desai was an interesting character that I’d like to know more about.

[on the plot]

I thought the first parts of the book were more plausible than the last part, though mainly I was glad that neither detective ran off and did something silly at the end of the book again and neither of them got injured in the process.

I liked the procedural aspects of the book with the team trying to find connections to other cases and with them getting babysat by others when the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. I thought it was a bit unlikely that they’d happen to pick up only the related murders when they picked other cases though. I liked the parts when Kathy started to uncover the theatrical connection when she was given the missing Zoe case which looked like a dead end and I thought it was realistic that the others weren’t interested in her findings because the forensic people had come up with a stronger tie to another case.

The ending was certainly the weakest part of the book to me, everything got a bit too fantastic. Bettina didn’t really work for me as a murderer, I could understand that she wanted to pay Stafford back for his imagined wrongs to her but something seemed slightly out of kilter. I thought Tom Gentle was creepy and I didn’t think he’d have confessed so readily, I got rather confused over how much was him and how much was Bettina.

On the whole I thought it was a good plot with lots of interesting details but could have done with a better ending.