I enjoyed the first third of this book a great deal. At about that point, my mood began to change and it took me a little while to put my finger on the reason. Tanika, the police officer in charge, has received a promotion and now has the authority to make Judith, Suzie, and Becks official assistants to the investigation. So why was Judith going rogue? She was excluding Tanika, deliberately disobeying reasonable requests, and truly running amok, questioning people in bull-in-the-china-shop style. It had been my impression in the second book that Tanika had better rapport with the older women than that. To see Judith disregarding that relationship and Tanika tolerating it annoyed me.
And, while the mystery is a good twisty one, I don't think that many people would have chosen the murderer who was finally revealed. I felt like Thorogood didn't play quite fair, but I can't complain too hard, as Agatha Christie pulled similar shenanigans. But it was the fracture between Judith and Tanika that truly disappointed me.
I have mixed feelings about continuing on, should another book be published. The subplot concerning Becks and her mother-in-law was well done and Becks' life as a vicar's wife reminds me quite a bit of Griselda Clement, the vicar's wife in The Body in the Library.
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