DCI Hennessey and his team are shocked when a number of corpses are discovered by a lawyer surveying the large property of a recently-deceased client; the homeowner is not a suspect, given that he had withdrawn into living in a single room in his huge mansion and was in his 90s at the time of death, but only a local could have known both that the property existed in isolation and that the owner was so invisible. The police must first try to identify the multiple victims and then search for any commonalities that might link them to an apparent serial killer…. This is the 21st book in the long-running series set in York, England, but only the second to be available in e-book form. Long-time readers will appreciate the attention to police-procedural detail while perhaps sighing a bit at the repetition of specific personal details in each character’s life (I simply skim those few paragraphs, which turn up pretty much verbatim in every book); I think new readers could start with this novel without losing too much of the context from the earlier books. The point of these novels is not to figure out “who done it” (it’s pretty obvious early on), but rather to notice the step-by-step work of police necessary to solving crimes, which is richly detailed. Recommended. ( )

I really expected to like this story a little more than I did judging from previous books in the series and the book description. There were just too many characters thatcould have done it and way too much time spent on the interviews of people that really knew nothing. ( )

much too easy for he police to solve. why did they have a helper? ( )