I didn’t expect to like this book better than the first one, Blue, but I think I did like it better overall. My comments about Blue read like I didn’t like it that much, that’s mostly because I was discussing it with a group of other people and sometimes it seems as if we tend to pull out the inadequacies of a book rather than praise the things we enjoyed. At least that’s what I seem to end up with at the end. Not being bound by a discussion when I was reading this book meant I was free to enjoy it without trying to think about the whys or what other people might not like in the book.

Outside of the pros and cons of book discussions I think this is a better book anyway. I think Blue McCarron is more level headed in this book, she’s less screwed up by lovers, she’s less of a bore about her social psychology (even though I did think her explanations of statistics were on very dodgy ground at some points - a thousand to one chance of something happening is not by any means “so unlikely that it just really could not happen”) and she did a lot better at not walking herself into dodgy situations (she does walk into them of course, but there’s rationale behind the walking, not just cliched ‘lone woman decides to check out noises in cellar’ type of rationale)

I don’t know if Padgett has any plans to write any more books about Blue, or even, given the way this book concludes, if I really want to know what happens to Blue next, but if there is another then I’ll be reading it because I like the character, I like the writing and the plot isn’t half bad either. These are a couple of books that I would hesitate to recommend to others because I know the reason I enjoyed them is mostly down to finding Blue a highly appealing character where I know others have found her downright annoying. I’m going to check out Padgett’s other series that seems to have more widespread appeal and see what I make of that.