Another book makes it onto my best books of the year list.

This isn’t a traditional whodunnit. We have the cliche of the victim needing to find out the identity of the true murderer in order to save the bacon of herself and those she cares about, but this set up doesn’t spoil the book. It’s about the only thing that did feel cliched. Everything else about this book smacks of realism.

There are so many small touches, intimate details and personal revelations in this book that I had a hard time believing in Maureen as a work of fiction. She could have been nothing more than a coathanger on which the author hung political issues however her background of psychiatric treatment and an abusing family just make her more real. She’s fully fleshed out.

There was a bit of self administered justice here, the sort of vigilanteism that’s prone to annoy me. This was the weakest part of the book for me. I’d guessed who the murderer was early on the book though and by the time the plot got around to doling out just desserts I was glad to see them given. The identity of the murderer being relatively obvious wasn’t a problem because there were enough missing links to find to make the detection worth while.

And the ending was fantastic. I’m glad to see Maureen’s back in other books. This was really a book that could stand alone though. I’ll be interested to see what happens in the rest of the series.