Blood Red (Primavera Blackstone series, Book 2): Murder and deceit abound in this thrilling mystery - Softcover

Quintin Jardine gave up the life of a political spin doctor for the more morally acceptable world of murder and mayhem. Happily married, he hides from critics and creditors in secret locations in Scotland and Spain.

Primavera Blackstone, the heroine of Jardine's crime thriller series set on the Catalan coast, mostly wrestles with her carnal attraction to Gerard Rivera, a local priest, in her middling second outing (after Inhuman Remains). When a fellow British ex-pat asks Primavera to organize a wine fair, despite opposition from José-Luis Planas Ros, a key member of the town council of L'Escala, she seeks out Planas and buys his support for the event. Soon afterward, Planas dies, apparently from a heart attack that causes him to fall over his garden wall to a rockery below. Primavera gets involved in what becomes a murder case, stumbling on the truth in the end. The self-absorbed lead and forgettable prose (Life is like a round of golf. If you drop a shot at one hole, you do your damnedest to get it back at the next) don't help a plot line more likely to appeal to romance readers than to fans of the author's sometimes grimly realistic Bob Skinner series (Fatal Last Words, etc.). (June)
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