If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’ve finished ‘Love Story, with Murders’, the DC Fiona Griffiths crime novel I mentioned in my last coffee share post. You might tell me that it took a long time, and I’d reply that there were reasons for that, but they were nothing to do with the book itself. I like the unusual character that Harry Bingham has created in Fiona, as I now feel I can call her, this being the second in the series. And precisely because it is the second in the series, I can’t reveal too much about her, for fear of spoilers if you haven’t read the first. Suffice it to say, then, that she has an intriguing, if not bizarre, personality and background, as well as a somewhat unusual set of friends. Oh, and her investigative methods are unorthodox, to say the least.
As the title of the first novel, ‘Talking to the Dead’, suggests, the deceased feature significantly, but perhaps not in quite the way you’d expect. ‘Love Story, with Murders’ kicks off with a gruesome discovery in a freezer; the icy theme continues as South Wales is gripped by freezing weather. That’s significant too. If you yearn every Christmas for deep, white, fluffy snow, one incident will probably change your mind about it for ever. Tense moments mingle with some mildly unsettling ones; there’s menace, but humour too. And the question of where Fiona came from is always, troublingly, there in the background.
So far, I’m really enjoying this series and will definitely be reading the next one; ‘The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths’. But wait… there is only one more to go after that (and one more coming soon, I believe). So the question is: read or save? What would you advise me to do?
afewgreenthoughts 