After a hound show at a hunting club, a man, naturally hated and who mistreats animals, is murdered. Later, a woman turns up as an apparent suicide, and another body surfaces.
I found the book a little difficult to get into, it is book seven in the “Sister” Jane Arnold series, and perhaps earlier books would help understand the characters.
Much of the book is in dialog form. I found the dialog natural and well written, and the people were well formed. There seemed to be too little investigation, I didn’t feel there was adequate information for a reader to actually figure it out.
One thing that did bother me was that the animals talked. Not to humans, or at least the humans didn’t understand them. I tried to interpret it as what humans interpret from their pets, but it did go beyond that. The hounds revealed the smell of the killer. It felt like something I shouldn’t have known, but it didn’t come into the solution.
The solution seemed to appear out of the blue in the late pages of the book. This just isn’t my style of book.
After more than 20 years, a young man appears at Kinsey’s office and asks her to investigate something he saw. Two men burying something when he was six years old. He believes it was related to a 20-year old kidnapping turned murder. During the investigation, they find a pet dog buried in the hold and that the man has a history of manipulation and a penchant for lying. However, the twists and turns lead to an interesting investigation and the death of the young man.
This is the latest in the series of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel stories by Laurie R. King. It is also the second in a two-part story starting in The Language of Bees. As its predecessor, this is more of an adventure story than a mystery, but the depth of Sherlock Holmes is not lost.