Lesa's Book Critiques: KEVIN’S CORNER ANNEX – A NICE PLACE TO DIE BY J. WOOLLCOTT

 Lesa's Book Critiques: KEVIN’S CORNER ANNEX – A NICE PLACE TO DIE BY J. WOOLLCOTT

Review: Blood Relations: A DS Ryan McBride Novel by J. Woollcott

 

It is several months after events in A Nice Place to Die as Blood Relations: A DS Ryan McBride Novel by J. Woollcott begins and the scene is bad. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and others have come this April day to Hungry Hall, a rundown country house near Antrium. It was the home of Patrick Mullen. Now he has been found very much dead in his bedroom in a scene that has shaken a number of officers.

 

Mullen was a retired Chief Inspector and a legend- for good and bad reasons. Ryan’s new boss, Inspector Whelan, believes that the killing has to be the work of somebody connected to one of Mullen’s old cases. McBride isn’t so sure as the intensity of the crime scene means he thinks it is personal and wants to focus on family and friends. Whelan says no and tells him to look at past cases. This will become an ongoing issue as Whelan does everything to micromanage his case, including putting him on the clock.  Of course, some of her need to control is being the new boss and trying to get credit to move up the ladder, but some of it no doubt goes back to when both first joined the police and became rivals to a certain extent. As his old boss discovered, it is best to let McBride do his thing and get out of the way as he closes cases.

 

What follows is a complicated read. Several secondary storylines introduced in the first book continue as characters continue to evolve and relationships change. The case also generates additional new and very interesting subplots. Those situations play a comfortable background medley to a complicated murder case and other crimes.

 

Much is going on in Blood Relations: A DS Ryan McBride Novel and the result is a complicated multi-dimensional read that works in all aspects. A book and a series that I never would have heard about if not for Aubrey’s recent review.

 

This is a series that builds on the previous book, A Nice Place To Die. Highly recommended.

 

 

My reading copy came by way of the publisher, Level Best Books, and NetGalley.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023

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

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Blood Relations by Joyce Woollcott

Joyce Woollcott was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland and now lives in Canada. Her debut, the first police procedural with Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and his partner Detective Sergeant Billy Lamont of the Belfast police, won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award, was short-listed in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in 2021, and was a Silver Falchion Award finalist at Killer Nashville 2023.

Her second book with DS McBride and DS Lamont is Blood Relations (Level Best Books, 2023). It is set just before COVID, when things changed on so many levels.

The gory murder of retired Chief Inspector Patrick Mullan in his isolated country house has Homicide scrambling for fast answers. The new Homicide manager is convinced the culprit will be found among the many miscreants Mullan sent to prison. The intensity of the killing makes McBride think the murder was personal and wants to look at Mullan’s family and close friends but he follows orders and begins checking with informants. He learns John Bell was released from prison the previous week and that Bell claimed Mullan interfered with his sentencing. In a similar vein McBride also hears suggestions and hints that Mullan was friendlier with the local crime bosses than was seemly for someone in his position.

A complicated investigation with multiple avenues to explore, a victim with a murky past, and intriguing subplots. The supporting characters are great, especially Gracie, Bell’s ex-wife, and Doris, Bell’s mother, who remain fast friends despite Gracie’s separation from Bell. Steady pacing of events and disclosure of clues prevented mid-story slump and kept me engaged.

I pointed out in a review about a month ago and I will say it again here that I am really tired of the competent cop fighting inept upper management trope that is so common now. Not that useless managers don’t exist, I have had more than my fair share of them. But portraying upper management as blithering idiots is not realistic. It’s more accurate to show them as consumed with the administrative demands of their positions: the higher up the chain any employee in any organization moves, the more attuned they have to be to financial and political dynamics. I always thought Steven Havill handled the uninformed manager in the early Bill Gastner books exceptionally well. It’s an approach more writers of police procedurals should consider.

Besides that aspect and I understand other readers may not find the theme as objectionable as I do, I really liked this book; I was especially delighted with the thread involving Gracie and Doris. Recommended!

 

 

·         Publisher: ‎Level Best Books (August 1, 2023)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Paperback: ‎286 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1685123996

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1685123994

 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2023

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.