Other Peoples' Houses

A female welsh detective and her romantic partner over the border in the Chesire constabulary investigate their own particular crimes (a murder at an outdoor pursuit centre and a series of burglaries from posh houses respectively) and we also get transcripts of a true crime / cold case podcast interspersed - quite a nice touch. Before long all of these cases are tangled together and things get Mackintosh trade-mark twisty.

Quite a few people here are drawn as rather unpleasant and unlikeable characters: estate agents, rich people, ambitious constables, the partner’s ex-wife. What I think that the author did need to do however was give us an actual likeable character to relate to! Both main characters didn’t come across very well, at least in the first three-quartrers of the book, although events started to move quickly in the final part and it did eventually get exciting and I did finally start to root for the heroes - although I think there was some bad, but perhaps understandable, decision making by the partner that unnecessarily triggered the big scene at the end. Although to be fair I’m not sure that I would have done any different in his situation.

Had I not been determined to get to the end of this to keep up my reading stats I might have abandoned this as I didn’t really like anybody but it turned out well in the end and I did enjoy it overall.