Review: A Nice Place To Die: A DS Ryan McBride Novel by J. Woollcott

A Nice Place To Die: A DS Ryan McBride Novel by J. Woollcott begins with a body in late October. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride, his partner, DS Billy Lamont, and others are at the river scene where a woman has been found dead. A body is always tough. In this case, even more so far DS Ryan as he knows the victim and had recently been intimate with her.

 

If he tells his boss, or anyone, he will be pulled from the case. The dead woman’s name is Kathleen McGuire. They connected in a local bar one evening and spent what he thought was a memorable night together. He definitely was interested and never heard back from her. Now he never will as the beautiful woman is dead. He is barely holding it together when her identical twin sister, Rose McGuire, shows up at Antrim Road Station looking to file a missing person’s report.

 

What follows is a complicated police procedural with a cast of interesting and complex characters. At the heart is DS Ryan McBride, a man who has seen a lot, prefers the quiet of his off-duty life at his farm, and seeks justice for the dead and the wronged. While the McGuire case takes the majority of his time, that isn’t the only case he and his team work in this complicated police procedural set in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

 

Book one of a series, this read sets the ground floor and does it very well. Several complicated cases, interactions between various members of the team with their own backstories and lives outside the job, and rich details of setting make A Nice Place To Die: A DS Ryan McBride Novel by J. Woollcott quite the read. 

Strongly recommended.

 

Make sure to read Aubrey’s recent review of the second book in the series, Blood Relations. It was because of her review I went looking for this first book and bought it on Amazon using funds in my Amazon Associate account.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023