Wednesday, September 12, 2012

27. Not My Blood

By:  Barbara Cleverly
Rated 4 Stars
Kindle Book



This is the 10th book in Cleverly's Joe Sandiland's detective series set in the 1920's and 30's. I ended up giving it a 4 of 5 stars in my reading journal. I have been waiting for this book since the first book "The Last Kashmiri Rose" was released in 2001. I always felt that it was inevitable that a follow up to that book would be written and sure enough, here it is. And I only had to wait for eleven years.

 It was written in her usual twisty style and I thought a couple of times I had it figured out but the solution slipped out of my grasp each time. I like a mystery that keeps me guessing until the end.

 I downgraded it slightly because I felt that the author had unnecessarily trashed one of the secondary characters at the end. I felt like it should have been left up to the reader to pass judgement on this character's actions based on their behavior in the first book. Perhaps the author though that not many of her readers would remember that far back but I did and I did not draw the same conclusions. Part of the fun of reading is placing ones own interpretations on events.

 I get enough of people trying to tell me how to think by what little notice I take of the MSM and RW pundits.

Publisher Summary 
Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands is caught off guard one night in 1933 by a phone call from a distressed boy named Jackie Drummond, who just might be the illegitimate son Joe never knew he had. Jackie is in trouble at his Sussex boarding school, where a teacher has been murdered. When Joe gets himself assigned to the investigation, he learns the boarding school case is more complicated than it appears: A frightening number of boys, all from wealthy families, have gone missing over the school’s history, and by some coincidence none of the families have followed up on their sons' whereabouts.