Review: The Canal Murders

The Canal Murders by J.R. Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Steph and Andy are having a week's holiday on a canal boat, but the first morning Steph finds a drifting canal boat with a dead body on board while taking an early morning stroll along the canal path. The victim, Annie Shipton, was a former small-time folk singer in a band called Rowan. She and a few of her bandmates live on canal boats in the area. Steph and Andy are keen to get involved, especially because the local detective is an old friend, Jav, and because the team is short-staffed Jav ropes in DCI Oldroyd to lend a hand. The interesting thing about this case is that there is no evidence that anyone else was on Annie's barge when she was stabbed in the neck, and no signs of a struggle.

Annie Shipton seemed to have been a cantankerous old woman, even on the night before she died she got into a row with another woman who resented something Annie had said about her on her blog. Annie was also the spokesperson for a campaign to stop the redevelopment of a local mill and clashed with the guy leading the development. A divorcee with an adult daughter Annie owed money to almost everyone.

I enjoyed this mystery, I didn't guess the murderer, although I did wonder why they didn't tell the Police something ... well now I know :) The motive was understandable and the crime was well thought out.

When I got this ARC and realised it was the tenth in a series I started reading the earlier books on Kindle Unlimited, not wanting to miss any nuances from the previous books. However, at about the fourth book (and admittedly I was reading them one after the other) I felt they had become a bit same-same and Oldroyd's theatrical tendencies had become a bit tiresome. Nevertheless, I took a break, read a few rom-coms, something historical, then came back to this with a new zest. Although Oldroyd still has his idiosyncrasies, they were muted in this book and Steph in particular calls him out when he is tempted to indulge himself. Which is a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed this and will definitely be reading books five to nine in the series soon.

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