Helpful Score: 1
Pretty good book. Wells is from England so some of the words and phrases she uses are different from ours so it takes a little time to get used to the meaning of some of her sentences, but overall I liked the character and thought the story was fairly good and will try more of hers.
A solid beginning to a series of traditional English detective novels. The protagonist in this one is a former police officer recently released from incarceration for assaulting a suspect. He's trying to rebuild his life by getting his PI license. But things are still unsettled at home, a fact complicated by him taking a case out of town. Setting the book in Lancashire adds some interest to the story, as it's not the usual scene for Brit mysteries. Author Wells is good at portraying believable small-town characters and she creates a likeable detective in Scott. Scott is hired to find a missing person so long gone he has to dig this cold case out of the deep freeze. And it has him delving into the pasts of a lot of people who would prefer to forget their younger lives.
This is the first book by Shirley Wells that I have read. The settings are in England and France. It involves a detective, Dylan Scott, who was disgraced by being accused of assaulting a suspect, dismissed from the Police force, AND put in jail for awhile! After he was released from jail, he went back home for awhile, but his wife finally threw him out of the house. He was living alone in a tiny apartment, when his mother decided she needed to come to live with him to help. She was about to drive him crazy when a young woman asked him to re-open the case of her mother, who had disappeared 13 years ago. The police had never solved the case. In fact, she felt they had barely tried to solve it. Dylan Scott, now being a private detective, decided to take the case, which also got him away from his mother. He is a very thorough Detective, as he had always been while on the force. I enjoyed the story, but it was slower moving than most mysteries that I like. It is interesting the way he tracked down all of the mother's former friends, enemies, old boyfriends and an ex-husband in his quest to solve the 13 year old case. In solving this case, it brought much of his self esteem back, plus he started getting other jobs after the news hit the papers. All in all, a pretty good story with lots of twists and turns.
