Saturday Slaughters Resumes Tomorrow

Not having been at the previous meeting, because I was in Vienna, and the library not having many copies of this month's read, and then Christmas intervening when I had other things to think about, I wasn't able to get a physical coy of the book for tomorrow, but that was fine because it was on Kindle for 99p. I bought it at the beginning of the week and have been trying to find the time to finish it ever since. And I managed that yesterday afternoon. Would that I could have done the same with Hamnet, although I am almost through that too. 

The book was Absolution by Caro Ramsay. She was a new author for me and Absolution is the first in  series of police procedurals set in Glasgow. As the first in a series it necessarily needs to introduce a fair few series characters, which the reader is gong to get invested in, as well as deliver a good plot in its own right.  Ramsay succeeds with both, and I can see I shall read more of this series as time goes by. 

My only two gripes, and they are small enough and one is very personal, are 1) the set up scenes, which take place twenty years before the main action, are rather too long, which is something anyone might find irritating and 2) the phrase 'x thought there must have been inhabitants of liberated Belsen who looked better than y did that morning'. Long term readers will know I have a deep seated objection to crass or indeed lightweight use of the Holocaust in popular fiction and this one was particularly crass, referring as it did to a detective with a very bad hangover who had suffered minor injuries in a self inflicted (because drunk) car accident. 

Other than that I was very happy with it. This positivity thing is going to get unnerving soon.