The Black Country

Book 3 for RIP………..

The Black Country by Alex Grecian.

Series: Scotland Yard's Murder Squad (Book 2) (however I find them good as stand alones)
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (May 21, 2013)
ISBN-10: 0399159339

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In March 1890, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith bring their Murder Squad expertise to the Midlands, where a husband, wife, and son have disappeared; the couple’s three other children, left unscathed, tell conflicting stories about what happened. An eyeball, discovered by a neighbor child, is the only clue. From the beginning, the bleak stage is set: a coal-mining town in winter with its slag heaps and gray snow on glumly shadowed streets that are lined with buildings sinking slowly into deserted mine shafts below. The town’s denizens, taciturn and superstitious, believe Blackhampton is cursed, as the disappearances are followed by an epidemic of violent illness. The suspense grows exponentially while the detectives unearth clues to a bizarre and complicated crime, hoping their forensic specialist, when he arrives, will shed light on the baffling plague and the eyeball’s owner. In contrast to Day’s first case (The Yard, 2012), this second in the series moves at a brisk pace, with surprising plot twists right up to the very end. Grecian’s riveting novel is an intelligent historical thriller similar to Jean Zimmerman’s atmospheric psychological novel The Orphanmaster (2012), and as shocking as David Morrell’s Murder as a Fine Art (2013). --Jen Baker

Alex Grecian has done it again and The Murder Squad was out to solve another murder!

Right off the bat I will tell you .. that anyone who read his first book The Yard, and liked it will also like his second book of The Black Country. 

The characters of Day and Hammersmith were pretty well hammered out in the first book.  But even if you haven’t read that one you can still enjoy this one.   It feels, to me, that the “series” will be Scotland Yard’s Squad out to find the body and the killer.  In this respect, other than using the same people from the murder squad, each book pretty much stands alone.  I don’t feel any great need that one has to read them in succession to enjoy them.  But maybe that will change in future books, who knows?

I very much enjoy this book.  Very easy reading, nothing confusing, and quite descriptive of the people and place where they are investigating.  In this case a small, old, coal town, full of tunnels beneath the ground and houses above that are beginning to sink into the ground because of the tunnels.

This particular story starts off fairly straight forward, but as in any good mystery, as it goes on you begin to think you know the answers, only to find out there are quite a few twists and turns.

This book gets a double thumbs up!  If you want a murder mystery, that’s an easy and fast read, this book is for you!