![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aThis morning I finished The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly. It's a mystery novel set in 1921 India, and the first of a series starring police detective Joe Sandilands.
I generally ask that my mystery novels do two things. First, they should move quickly, entertaining me without ever slowing down. Second, they should contain an interesting and fair mystery, with some surprising twists that a particularly clever reader might have sussed out.
It's rare for me that a mystery book successfully manages both criteria. The Spenser novels and the alphabet novels are both quite quick-moving (Spenser moreso than Millhone) but they don't have particularly fair mysteries. In the Spenser novels, there isn't any particular attention paid to setting up a solvable mystery, while in the Millhone novels, things come way out of right field too often.
The Last Kashmiri Rose has a good mystery with some good twists, but it was slightly on the slow side.
And, in retrospect, I'd generally prefer a quick-moving mystery-less Spenser than a slower mystery-ful Sandilands. However, I expect I will try out the next in the series at some point.
I generally ask that my mystery novels do two things. First, they should move quickly, entertaining me without ever slowing down. Second, they should contain an interesting and fair mystery, with some surprising twists that a particularly clever reader might have sussed out.
It's rare for me that a mystery book successfully manages both criteria. The Spenser novels and the alphabet novels are both quite quick-moving (Spenser moreso than Millhone) but they don't have particularly fair mysteries. In the Spenser novels, there isn't any particular attention paid to setting up a solvable mystery, while in the Millhone novels, things come way out of right field too often.
The Last Kashmiri Rose has a good mystery with some good twists, but it was slightly on the slow side.
And, in retrospect, I'd generally prefer a quick-moving mystery-less Spenser than a slower mystery-ful Sandilands. However, I expect I will try out the next in the series at some point.