The Murder Garden by Alice CastleMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Eighth in a cosy detective series set in the chichi London suburb of Dulwich Village. Our heroine Beth Haldane is a single mother, widowed very young, with a propensity for stumbling over murders in what had until recently been a very safe area of London. She and her 'boyfriend' DCI Harry York seem to have given up on the idea of buying a house together in a cheaper area and have instead decided to build a Shoffice (part shed and part office) at the end of the garden. Unfortunately, Beth's dreams of getting rid of Harry's Golden Age novels and her son's gaming equipment into the Shoffice is thwarted when the builders find what is unmistakably a human bone. With Harry working late on another case, a group of dedicated CSI detectives traipsing in and out of her cottage, and a dog desperate to eat said bones, Beth is forced to investigate the murder in order to have any chance of getting her Shoffice built.
Finally, a book in this series in which the reader has a chance to guess the murderer's identity because there are actual clues! It's only taken eight books to get to this point. Also, I think Alice Castle has realised that there seems to be little chemistry between Harry and Beth and has introduced a potential new love interest in the form of the dour chief CSI officer - already he gets my vote over the bossy and fairly useless Harry. As I have noted previously, this series takes cosy mysteries to a new level where there is more detail about who Beth has coffee with and what homework her son has been set than there is actual detecting.
I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley and on my Kindle Unlimited subscription in return for an honest review.
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