jonas holly – Only Mostly Dead

RED Book 26: Finders Keepers – Belinda Bauer

So if you’re going to read, or are reading, Darkside then you may not want to read this review yet. It contains no actual spoilers but by implication it tells you at least one thing about the previous book.

Finders Keepers is I suppose the third in a trilogy of books which began with Blacklands but it’s more like the second Jonas Holly book after Darkside.

Finders Keepers begins as a child goes missing from a car on Exmoor and a note is left which reads “You Don’t Love Her”. More children go missing and similar notes are left. Once again a police team is sent across from Taunton, largely the same characters and once again Holly is involved in the investigation.

Steven Lamb returns again and plays a key role. Also this time we also get to meet his younger brother Davey who has a plan to catch the kidnapper.

There are things that Bauer is good at that she still does well in this book – the creation of tension and suspense, relationships between characters, particularly in families – but somehow it wasn’t as effective overall as her previous two books. I definitely didn’t have that same sense of wanting to know what happens next and being caught up in it. Also I think the actual crime and the villain are, ah, a little weird.

The main reason I read this straight after Darkside was to get resolution on Holly himself and you do get that but by the time it came the character was so abused – both in terms of himself and the way he’s used in the story – that I was a little jaded and didn’t really care. Which is a shame.

6/10 – not bad but failed to live up to the potential of the previous two books.

RED Book 25: Darkside – Belinda Bauer

Darkside by Belinda Bauer is the follow up to Blacklands which I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. I bought Darkside as soon as it came out but with the way these things go I found myself reading other things first. (This, by the way, is why I’m wary of start a series.)

It’s not quite a sequel to Blacklands although it’s set in the same part of the world and Steven Lamb, the hero of that book is a character in this. It’s a few years later and Steven is now a teenager but the book follows the village policeman Jonas Holly. Holly is relatively young and had a promising career but had to give it up when his wife got sick. They now live in the village of Shipcott. When an elderly woman is murdered as the local policeman Holly is obviously involved, but after a bad start with a team sent over from Taunton he soon becomes sidelined even as the investigation grows and more murders follow.

Something happened to me when I read this book that used to happen all the time and hardly ever seems to happen any more. It’s the reason I read and the thing I look for when I read. I got so swept up in what was happening that I couldn’t put the book down. I just wanted to keep reading in order to find out what happened next. So for that reason alone I really loved this book. I thought the characters were great and the interactions interesting. The head of the Taunton team, who takes an instant dislike to Holly, seems at first blush to just be a barely competent detective who is merely there as an adversary and contrast to Holly, but actually he’s more interesting than that. Holly’s relationship with his wife and the relationship between his work and looking after his wife are also story threads that engage.

There is one thing, and that is the ending. It wasn’t that I was disappointed or annoyed, merely that there was something about it that was left unanswered. Maybe it didn’t need to be and so I chose to reserve judgement.

9/10 – a slightly ambiguous ending but it didn’t spoil an excellent book.