Hmmmm, hard to know how to put into words how I feel about this book. I keep hearing from a number of different sources about how this series is rapidly freewheeling into decline and so I was expecting to be disappointed by it. In the light of going into the book thinking like that I was fairly pleased by the story. But I think everyone else probably has a point and the series isn’t half as good as it once was.

One thing that isn’t working for me is Anna’s new relationship with the sherriff and priest. The series needs a relationship that adds something to the stories and takes Anna to new places. And this relationship is underdeveloped, under utilised and just feels generally tacked on rather than part of Anna’s life. To be fair Anna’s previous boyfriends in the series haven’t been great parts of the story, even Fred the Fed who stuck around for the longest time and had a role in the mysteries as well as in the love life didn’t work very well. So the sheriff part of her new man seems destined to not fit in very well on the law enforcement side, and the priest bit will give atheist Anna ethics to muddle with but won’t serve that purpose as well as alcohol did. I hope Barr is just setting the boyfriend up to be a baddie in a future book.

The mystery here is better than I’d expected but not a patch on earlier episodes. Some things seemed blatantly silly. Anna blunders recklessly into trouble too many times and I can almost let her get away with this as she is a member of an understaffed policing team and it’s more or less her job to blunder into trouble like this, but it is getting tired now.

And last, but not least, I’m fed up with Anna staying in one National Park. I miss the wide and varied landscapes of the places that the earlier books were set. Adventures on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi seem to consist mainly of driving up and down the road and Barr remarks herself numerous times how repetitive the scenery is. The boyfriend situation doesn’t look good for moving Anna someplace more interesting though.

In summary, not as bad as I’d feared, not as good as I’d hoped, and not many signs that the series will rebound either.