Where Memories Lie

 Deborah Crombie combines the personal with the professional in her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mysteries. Here, the two are throwing their first dinner party as a couple, inviting his boss and his wife and both partners new professional partners to round out the table. Towards the end Gemma gets a call from a distressed friend. Art expert Erika Rosenthal, who escaped Nazi Germany with her late husband, and one of her former students has seen the broach her father made and which was stolen during her escape in a local auction brochure. As she begins asking a few low-key questions for her friend, Gemma discovered that Erika's husband was murdered in the 1950s and the detective on that case mysteriously died a few days after being told to stop investigating. Will Gemma solve the cold case, and is it connects to the murder of a young auction house employee? Maybe it's a bit coincidental but Crombie ties the crimes together in an unexpected way.

Water Like a Stone

Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid are police detectives so they shouldn't have to stumble across dead bodies. Deborah Crombie's mysteries border the cozy sub-genre so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when their Christmas, the first spent with Duncan's family in Cheshire, includes a murder investigation. As the couple arrive with enthusiastic 5-year-old Toby, moody teenage Kit, and two dogs, Duncan's sister Juliet calls - she's found an infant's body behind the plaster of the barn she's rehabbing. Duncan and Gemma are off duty, but the DI on the case is an old friend (of sorts) so he allows them to observe. When Kit finds the body of a longboat dwelling former social worker, a woman who'd let him and his father visit the boat, there's no way the London police can stay out of the case.

As for Juliet, finding the body isn't her only worry. She'd recently opened her building business after quitting her job as office manager to her husband's investment firm, akin to the tension created by his mistaken belief that she'd been having an affair with his business partner, Piers Dalton. Their teenage daughter Lally has secrets of her own, involving Piers's son Leo and a classmate who'd drowned a few months earlier. Kit finds himself between his magnetic new cousin and his basic nature as a good kid scarred by his mother's death. His attempt to protect her puts himself in danger and unmasks the murderer.

Crombie's books are the anti-Law & Order; the detectives personal lives play a central role. Christmas was the perfect time for Gemma, Toby, and Kit to meet Duncan's casually affectionate and welcoming parents. Cheerful, energetic Toby happily accepts them as grandparent, and Gemma almost immediately feels at home with her almost-in-laws, so different from her working class parents. Kit has a slightly harder time, as one would expect considering the fraught relationship with his maternal grandparents who are fighting Duncan, who has not legally been declared Kit's father, for custody. Despite the recurring nightmare of finding his mother's body and the turmoil caused by Lally, Kit warms to his new family. Even if the mystery wasn't a good one, Water Like a Stone would be worth reading as a straight novel. 

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.

Now May You Weep

 Duncan Kincaid took the lead in the first of Deborah Crombie's mysteries, and now it's time for Gemma James to solve a personal mystery mostly on her own. Her friend Holly has invited her to a cooking weekend in Scotland and still recovering physically and emotionally from her trauma-induced stillbirth, Gemma is glad for the break from home. Once they arrive, Gemma realizes her friend was also using her as cover for her burgeoning affair with old flame Douglas Brodie, a whiskey distiller whose family had a centuries old rivalry with Holly's family. Further complicating matters, Holly's boarding school roommate co-owns the B&B where they're staying and Holly's cousin (who worked for Douglas) is another one of the guests. When Douglas is murdered, everyone at the B&B except Gemma has the motive, opportunity, or both to have committed the crime and, working with the resentful local police and with late help from Duncan, she identifies the culprit. Crombie intersperses the present-day narrative with Holly's ancestor's diary entries so the reader knows more than the detective but not so much that I solved the case more easily than Gemma. There's also a subplot (Duncan's son Kit's grandmother is suing for custody and Kit's putative father in Toronto is remarrying) but it's well integrated, feeling more like the day-to-day pressures Gemma feels as part of a blended family.

And Justice There Is None

 Deborah Crombie's seventh Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel starts with change. Gemma's been promoted to DI and transferred to Notting Hill so both are breaking in new partners. It's also the Christmas season and they're combining households (prompted by Gemma's pregnancy) in a house in Gemma's new territory so when someone murders the wife of a local antiques dealer, some of the suspects are the detectives' new neighbors and local gossip is part of her investigation. Duncan complicates matters by seeing a link between an unsolved case he worked on two months earlier. Gemma can't see the link (and maybe feels a bit like she can't get out of her former boss's shadow), but the memories of a woman known as Angel who grew up in post-WWII Notting Hill slowly provide clues for the reader. Personally, I like it when I solve the mystery a few pages ahead of the detectives and that's what happened here. Beyond that, And Justice There Is None works as a novel where we see the characters' relationships evolve realistically - mostly in positive ways, but with bumps and awkward situations. It's my favorite in the series so far.

Kissed a Sad Goodbye

*Warning - minor character spoilers*

I'm reading Deborah Crombie's books as backlist, and I enjoy watching Gemma's and Duncan's relationship unfold.  Now officially a couple (although still partnered at work), they're still working out the details of their relationship.  Duncan is also tentatively building a relation ship with the son he didn't know he had until his ex-wife's murder in Dreaming of the Bones.

Kit comes up from Cambridge to spend the weekend with Duncan, whom he thinks is just a friend, and the rare adult who won't let him down. Duncan, of course, ends up being called out on a case, the murder of a Annabelle Hammond, whose body was left on a footpath in a gentrifying  section of London. She's the CEO of a tea company with warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, and suspicion falls on Lewis Finch, the developer responsible for most of the local redevelopment.  As fits with a mystery set against shifting present-day relationships, the motive is more visceral. Annabelle's father William and Lewis Finch were evacuees together during WWII, and Crombie shifts between the current crime and the men's adolescence in a rural mansion, and we learn that the roots of both their estrangement and Annabelle's death can be found in a 1945 tragedy.

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.

Mourn Not Your Dead

Warning - mild spoiler for Leave the Grave Green

I'm beginning to wonder why Duncan Kincaid gets so many high profile cases.  I've read five of Deborah Crombie's mysteries and Duncan has investigated the deaths of two high ranking police officers and the son-in-law of a famous opera couple (conductor and soprano).  I guess he has a reputation for being discreet.  A week after their impulsive night together, Duncan and his DS Gemma James find themselves investigating the bludgeoning of Commander Alister Gilbert.  The suspects fall into two categories, professional and personal.  Gilbert may have been involved in some high level corruption, he wasn't popular in his village, and there's something "off" about how his wife and stepdaughter act during their initial interviews.

Normally, Gemma and Duncan would coordinate their investigation, but their encounter has gotten in the way.  For Duncan, it was the natural release of the barely recognized sexual tension between the two, but for Gemma - younger, lower-ranked, and a woman - it was a risky, potentially stupid act.  She has feelings for Duncan, or thinks she does, but she's a young divorced single parent from a working class background whose ex-husband is less than diligent with support payments.  Because of the shifting point of view (and because the pair married several books later), we know that Duncan isn't being predatory, but Gemma doesn't know that, or exactly what she feels towards Duncan.  This could hurt the career she needs on multiple levels, and this conflict begins to spill into their working relationship.  It doesn't prevent them from solving the crime, and Crombie doles out the clues so that I came to the right conclusion about the same time as Gemma and Duncan.

Leave the Grave Green

One reason why my mom loves Deborah Crombie's mysteries (and pushed me to read them) is how she blends police department politics into her novels.  That's at play in Leave the Grave Green, where the Assistant Commissioner calls in Duncan Kincaid to take on the case of Connor Swann's drowning.   Connor's in-laws are a famous conductor and opera singer, both knighted in their own rights, and twenty years earlier their son had drowned in the same flooded stream.  As Duncan explores the family matters (and becomes attracted to the victim's widow), Gemma explores the world of opera.  Along the way they find several viable suspects and motives (the widow is always a suspect, and the victim's gambling connected him to a particularly unsavory local character).  Crombie created an unexpected conclusion, though, which surprised me and in which the separate worlds in which Connor Swann lived collide.

All Shall Be Well

I wonder whether Deborah Crombie planned for her main characters to fall in love and eventually marry, or if it just happened.  Knowing that they do, I looked for signs in All Shall Be Well, and while Duncan Kincaid may be feeling the first hints of his attraction to Gemma James, the recently divorced and frazzled single mum doesn't quite have the energy to notice.

Crombie, as usual, shows their relationship against a murder case.  Jasmine Dent was terminally ill, but Duncan, her upstairs neighbor, doesn't think her death scene appears natural.  Her book and glasses aren't by the bed, and the scene just seems wrong.  So was she murdered or was it a mercy killing?  She'd asked Margaret Bellamy, a rather downtrodden young co-worker, to help her die but according to Margaret, Jasmine had changed her mind.  Margaret's sponging boyfriend might have thought that Jasmine would leave Margaret money he'd be able to use, and of course Jasmine's home care nurse would have the means and knowledge to commit a mercy killing.  Jasmine's brother, watching yet another business fail and knowing that his sister would no longer bail him out has a strong motive, and even the retired Major living downstairs from Jasmine and Duncan turns out to have reason to hold a grudge against her.  Once again, Crombie manages a surprise ending that's fully supported.  I've read three of her books and each ending has been a well-founded surprise.  It's going to take some self control to not binge-read her backlist.

No Mark Upon Her

My mom has been reading Deborah Crombie's books since the start of the series, but No Mark Upon Her is the first volume she's handed to me.  I prefer reading series from the start, so as soon as my annual book diet ends, I'm gong to start working my way through the thirteen books that precede it.

Rebecca Meredith had been a shoo-in for the Olympic rowing team at 22, until she went skiing and broke her wrist a few months before the trials.  Nearly 15 years later, she's a Scotland Yard DI and maybe, possibly, about to try again for the Olympic team.  When she misses an appointment with her ex-husband (who needs some information on a potential investor, a recently retired police official), he assumes the worst.  He's right - Becca has been murdered and left to drift downstream from her grounded shell.  Police brass call in DI Duncan Kincaid, just married and about to take family leave with his newly adopted daughter.   They trust Duncan to both solve the case and to be discreet, because they suspect that police politics may have lead to Becca's murder.  With his wife, DS Gemma  Jones (still on family leave) and her former assistant Melody Talbot investigating the rumors that bubble up during the official case, Duncan and his assistant Doug Cullen discover the killer's identity.

Or did they?  Crombie pulls off one of the hardest tricks for a mystery novelist, a true surprise ending that's fully supported.  That, and how skillfully Crombie blends in Duncan's and Gemma's domestic life, is why I now have a new series to read.