I really enjoyed this and thought it was much better crafted than the first in the series but I think the author wrote several other books in between. There’s a very short list of suspects for the murder but the misdirection is very cleverly done and I didn’t feel at all cheated by the resolution, really very clever. It’s a very old fashioned kind of setup: a small village that’s practically snowbound at Christmas and the body turns up at the vicarage. But it’s definitely a modern non-cosy mystery, it just plays with the golden age kind of setting whilst having many elements that are up to date.

It’s looking good for a series with the main police protagonists getting their private lives all in a mess too, complicated situations making for much better ongoing stories than simple ones as horrid as it sounds to say it!