Kindle British & Irish Mystery Book Club discussion

Spoken Bones by N.C. Lewis

"Detective Inspector Fenella Sallow is obsessive about her work and driven by her own demons. When the body of a retired artist is discovered atop the blackened embers of the town bonfire, the community is rocked to the core.

It falls to DI Fenella Sallow and her team to find out how she came to be there. In her fifties, the veteran detective inspector thought she had seen it all. But behind the curtained windows and closed doors of the idyllic Cumbria coastal setting lurks pure evil.

Fenella must confront her dark past. Haunted by the unsolved case of a missing girl, she knows it is a race against time. Can she stop this death from slipping through her fingers, too?

Before long, it becomes disturbingly clear that the killer is playing a twisted game and will do anything to conceal the terrible truth of what happened on the beach on Bonfire Night."

Discussion leader: Bill Kupersmith
Amazon.Co.Uk book link - https://amzn.to/3Z0QBvL

I’m enjoying this on Audible whilst travelling.

Bill wrote: "I’m enjoying this on Audible whilst travelling."

Nice. Who is the narrator/reader? Anyone well known?

I think it’s the first time I have to disagree with Bill. I also listened on audio-books

I found the mystery long and drawn out with more emphasis in the book on the personal issues of the three police officers than on the mystery

It dragged on with useless tidbits until the last few chapters and suddenly the mystery is solved

Part of my issue may have been the narrator (Deborah Bahm). Example someone was supposed to have a Scottish accent and instead they were Irish But really, I don’t think that impacted on the slow Pace of this book

I gave it 2-stars

2 stars and that is generous. Not impressed at all. Far too padded out with bizarre characters - the SIO seems to be the only normal in the lot! (Scarily, Phoebe was a genuine Penzance surname in the 1800s... then it died out.)

Then I decided to research the author, who turns out to be a Texan who had been churning out up to five books a year since about 2017 until embarking on this series, when her output has dropped to just a couple, then one a year. Well, at least they are being produced by a human being. There was a point when I thought it might be AI...