Dreaming of the Bones

Warning - minor character spoiler

Deborah Crombie didn't tell us much about Duncan Kincaid's ex-wife in the first few installments of the series he shares with Gemma James, so we are as surprised as he is when Victoria calls him.  She's a Cambridge professor, working on a biography of local poet Lydia Brooke who died by suicide in the mid-80s. Victoria's research has led her to believe that Brooke was murdered, buy by whom and why? She's interviewed Brooke's friends but they fall into two categories - intentionally unhelpful (a local headmistress, Victoria's pretentious colleague) and honestly uninformed (Brooke's angry artist ex-husband, Victoria's neighbor). Duncan agrees to meet her, but thinks it's pointless to open a decades old suicide case.

Until Victoria's tween son finds her dead. Her death appears natural, except she was a healthy woman in her late 30s with no pre-existing conditions and no sign of trauma.  Was she killed because she was about to discover that Lydia Brook was murdered - and the reason why? Crombie, like Tasha Alexander, uses an interleaved parallel narrative to solve the mystery of Lydia Brook, and from there I found Victoria's murderer at about the same time as Duncan and Gemma.  Fleshed out with the growth of the police partners' personal relationship and a few complications regarding the familiar air around Victoria's son Kit, Dreaming of the Bones succeeds as both a novel and a puzzle.