A Snapshot of Murder
Kindle Edition, 448 pages
Published October 25th 2018 by Piatkus
Goodreads synopsis:
Taking the perfect photograph can be murder . . .
Yorkshire, 1928. Indomitable sleuth Kate Shackleton is taking a well-deserved break from her detective work and indulging in her other passion: photography. When her local Photographic Society proposes an outing, Kate jumps at the chance to visit Haworth and Stanbury, in the heart of Brontë country, the setting for Wuthering Heights.
But when an obnoxious member of their party is murdered, the group is thrown into disarray. Is the murderer amongst them, or did the loud-mouthed Tobias have more enemies than they might have imagined?
Armed with her wit and wiles, and of course her trusty camera, it's up to Kate to crack the case, and get that perfect shot too
***
3 Stars
This book was really slow for me. The murder didn’t occur until 50% into the book and I found myself speculating who might end up dead. I figured it would either be Tobias or Edward.
My favorite characters were Edward, Kate, Marcus and Derek. I found these to be the most compelling of the bunch. In the beginning, I was a little unsure who the main character was considering the immense amount of time focusing on Carine and her background with both Tobias and Edward.
I felt like this book could have been 100-150 pages shorter and be a much better title for the publisher. It reminded me of books of yore that prattled on and on and going seemingly nowhere before the point of the story was reached. It was wordy and long-winded.
The setting was interesting once they got to the area where the photography outing was journeying. I also thought the scenes with the dog discovering a body in the basement were particularly clever. I was surprised this was not elaborated on more considering how wordy the rest of the book had been.
I thought the whodunit was quite crafty and the killer quite surprising. Kate seemed to come to many conclusions “off stage” where the reader could not witness it. So in that case, it made the following of the clues particularly difficult.
All in all tis book had a lot of potential, A little overly wordy and long but the clever plot, whodunit mystery and the surprising killer more than made up for its shortcomings.
I received this as an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) in return for an honest review. I thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for allowing me to read this title.
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Before turning to crime, Frances wrote for radio, television and theatre, and was nominated for a Time Out Award. She published four sagas, winning the HarperCollins Elizabeth Elgin Award in 2006.
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