Serpent's Point: Book 26 in the DI Wesley Peterson crime series

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However, they have found some coins in the field and when Wesley sees them, he immediately contacts his university friend Neil Watson, with whom he had studied archaeology at Exeter university. The plot is simple really and gradually builds up where over the last 100 pages of the book there’s a slow unravel of information. She has also twice been shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger and been longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. The book starts with the friend of a woman getting married at the courthouse without family or friends attending. The enticing opening of this the 26th book in the DI Wesley Peterson series set in Devon has you hooked with the first line ‘The Bridegroom had strangler’s hands.

This was so interesting and really got exciting at the end as they rescue a friend of Wesley's wife, Pam, who has apparently been taken advantage of it by a murderous con man. The number of potential suspects and the work Gerry, Wesley and the rest of the team have to put into whittle them down keeps you guessing to the end.Ellis connects archaeological studies of the past with present-day crimes, and the setting in Devonshire along with the other characters in the police station are also well-done. In this case, Wesley, Gerry, and the team are trying to solve the murder of a young woman who was doing a bit of detective work of her own, trying to find the man who married and murdered one young woman, then married another (the woman's friend) who mysteriously disappeared. As always such a treat to revisit the characters who are now, after 26 books in the series, cosily familiar.

I wouldn't say this story gripped and intrigued me as much as some of the others but still a solid, very readable instalment. Also, that she had been conducting an investigation into unsolved missing person cases, in various parts of the country. Lovely to be with old friends, again, even if it was only for a few days and thank you to Kate Ellis being able to transport me there. Meanwhile Neil, Wesley's friend from his days as an anthropology student, is excited to find what looks like the remains of a Roman village and we learn, through letters, that this is not a new discovery. Such a gripping tale that, as well as Wesley and Gerry being in Devon, where their the first murder takes place, takes us to The Cotswolds and Yorkshire on the track of a what they now know is a serial killer.As Wesley delves into the life of the dead woman, he learns that she has been house sitting at Serpents Point, a large house near where she was found. Quite often it can be clunky when there are multiple time lines, but keeping the timeline in the past quite simply narrated really worked well. As in every book of this series, there's a parallel story involving Wesley's archaeologist friend Neil Watson, who's excavating a possible Roman site near the scene of Susan's murder. The writing was done well and it was clear what the author's intentions were whilst writing but I felt that the story was a little slow. There were a few other little leaps of logic in the book which also jarred slightly and could very easily have been smoothed out.