The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place returns Flavia de Luce to all the things I loved about the series in the first place. It’s a small town mystery and thankfully without a whiff of the international intrigue / Flavia as spy turn that soured me on the Canadian Flavia stories. It also has a lot of the characters we’ve come to love from Buckshaw, all of whom seem to feature more prominently in this mystery than in previous Flavia instalments. Grave has all the elements you’d expect of a great Flavia de Luce story, and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t outright love it as much as I thought and hoped I would, and I’m not completely sure why.

[SPOILER for the previous book below.]

The story begins with Flavia and her sisters mourning the death of their beloved father, who was Flavia’s foundation of strength for most of the series. Flavia, Daffy, Feely and their manservant / family friend Dogger go on a holiday at an idyllic small town, and while rowing on a river one lazy day, Flavia accidentally discovers a dead body. She investigates the death, locks horns with the local cop, and digs up secrets that some of the townspeople would rather stay hidden.

I like how the secondary characters played important roles in this mystery. Poetry-loving Daffy discovers one of the suspects is a famous yet reclusive poet, and her analysis of the poetry unearths some clues for the case. Feely has become estranged from her boyfriend Dieter, yet they meet up in this book and later play a crucial role in the mystery’s big reveal. We also get some fascinating hints about Dogger’s past, and possibly an important figure in it, and I really liked that insight into his character.

The mystery is solid Flavia fare. The corpse in the water leads Flavia to a series of murders committed years earlier, as well as some desperate characters in the present. The villain’s motivation is disturbing, but not too delved into. There’s also a lot of science as Flavia — and even Daffy at one point! — use chemistry and scientific knowledge to investigate.

There’s a nice, bittersweet tone to this story as Flavia comes to terms with her father being gone. There’s also a nice segue to the future of the series on the final page, and it’s a turn that feels fitting for the characters and the way the series as a whole is progressing.

So in short, it delivers everything you’d expect and want in a Flavia story, yet it didn’t wow me as the others have. It’s not that the series is getting stale — there’s a lot of new character development in this book and, as I said, there was a welcome adding of depth to secondary characters. Flavia’s ghoulishness was off-putting (what kind of person accidentally picks up a corpse by the mouth and get all giddy with excitement?!), but she’s always been somewhat ghoulish and it’s only started to bother me in recent books. Possibly it’s just me feeling a bit tired of the series, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the books. I’ll still check out the next Flavia book, as I do like that Bradley appears to be returning the series to its roots while still acknowledging the growth the characters have gone through, but I don’t think I’ll be eagerly anticipating it as much as I used to.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Martin Reese is a bit of a reverse Jack the Ripper: rather than killing women and taunting the police about their failure to catch him, he uses police files on serial killers to track down their victims’ missing bodies, then taunts police about their failure to find the victims themselves. Detective Sandra Whittal isn’t amused, but more importantly, she worries about how such an obsession may eventually escalate. For Martin, part of it is personal: his wife’s sister went missing and presumed killed when they were younger, and even though the killer was caught and executed, his wife has never quite gotten over the experience. Yet another part of it is just creepy as hell. For example, we learn that Martin actually met his wife in the first place because he’d tracked her down after having his interest piqued by her sister’s case. And later on, a serial killer recognizes the darkness in Martin and tags him as a potential protege.

Find You in the Dark is being billed as similar to Dexter and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and certainly, Martin Reese’s obsession with missing serial killer victims is twisted enough to put him in league with these two fictional killers. But the story itself didn’t quite live up to the promise of its concept. It’s a solid enough thriller, and its twists and turns were surprising enough, but it was very much touch and go in terms of holding my interest, and to be honest, I’m not sure why. Part of it may be that Martin lacks the sheer charisma that make Dexter and Tom Ripley so compelling as anti-heroes. He also lacks the depth of menace that makes Hannibal Lecter such a compelling villain.

Another part of it is that the story itself felt unsure of where exactly Martin lay in the divide between hero and villain, and that this uncertainty never felt particularly gripping. Martin had a bit of a hero complex, wanting to ferret out bad guys’ victims, and he had a bit of a creepy side with his obsessive fascination with the bodies in the first place, but by the end of the book, the overall impression of him was that of a protective father, and his concern for his daughter’s safety overtook pretty much both sides of his personality. While his need to protect his daughter was understandable, the result was that Martin as a villain lacked teeth, and after a point, his creepy hobby felt more pathetic than truly menacing.

There were some strong parts, and I liked the police procedural aspects with Detective Whittal, but overall, it was a pretty uneven read and ultimately not very memorable.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read Need to Know after a string of pretty good but not incredible thrillers — the kind I could tell were well-crafted yet failed to keep me hooked 100% — and I was beginning to wonder if I was suffering from thriller burnout. Need to Know was just the cure I needed. I found myself devouring the book on the subway, on my lunch breaks and late into the night, and it was an incredible page turner.

Vivian Miller, a CIA counterintelligence analyst investigating a potential Russian sleeper cell in the States, makes the horrific discovery that one of the sleeper agents she’s investigating is someone she knows. The greatest achievement of her professional career forces Vivian to confront an impossible ethical dilemma, between her loyalty to her country and her loyalty to the people she loves. Need to Know is told at a breakneck pace, with one twist and revelation after another, and it was such a fun ride.

More than that, however, I loved how the story highlighted an experience that many professionals in high pressure jobs likely face: the tension between their personal life and their professional one. Cleveland does a great job in painting a picture of the duality in Vivian’s life, with both the professional and the personal aspects being equally important. Even though we later learn that investigating Russian operatives wasn’t necessarily Vivian’s dream job, she clearly takes pride in her work and has great talent for it. Equally important is her role as mother and wife, and I love how Cleveland makes it clear how much Vivian loves her family and her life with them, such that putting this part of her life in jeopardy for the sake of her job or even for the sake of her country is no easy decision.

Author Karen Cleveland is herself a former CIA analyst, and maybe that’s part of why she’s so good at creating such a twisty and exciting thriller. While the final twists weren’t much of a surprise to me, it did take me until fairly close to the big reveals to figure them out, and the experience was just a lot of fun. I can imagine this book being turned into an action thriller movie, or some Netflix show with a Jack Bauer 24 vibe. I highly recommend this to fellow thriller lovers.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.