In a Dark House

 Sometimes, a mystery novel has too much plot. That's my opinion of Deborah Crombie's In a Dark House but I still found it entertaining. The book starts with a young firefighter chatting with her colleague before they're called out on an arson fire. You can feel their friendship and romantic potential, so it's not a surprise when he dies during the fire. He's not the only casualty - there's a woman's body on the ground floor - and Duncan Kincaid leads the police investigation. Meanwhile, Duncan's cousin, a Cambridge based vicar who's covering for one of her colleagues, asks Gemma James to come along on a welfare check of one of her parishoners. Fanny Liu is a former nurse now disabled by Guillaume-Beret and her flatmate, who also helps her with daily activities has disappeared. There's also a missing child case and a murder connected to the battered women's shelter adjacent to the fire site, and all plots end up being at least loosely connected. It's not the best mystery I've read, but Crombie's characters are engaging and feel like real people and each individual solution is well supported. In a Dark House is a bit too convoluted to be a good mystery but it works as a novel.