I like the Journalist Character Best

Best for: People looking for a bit of mystery set in an interesting place.

In a nutshell: Police officer Ari Thor is stuck in his town during a quarantine situation and looking into a 50-year-old mystery, while two seemingly unrelated crimes are looked into by journalist Isrun.

Why I chose it: After I read the first, I ordered all four others in the series. No regrets.

Review:
A baby is kidnapped. A recovered substance abuser is hit by a car. A man’s wife was beaten to death. A nephew is wondering if his aunt died by suicide or was murdered. Some of these stories might be related. How we find that out is interesting.

Ari Thor is less of an ass in this one. He’s a bit of a … blowhard? At one point he’s telling a story that affects someone else’s life and he chooses to stretch out the storytelling while that person is clearly distressed. I know the readers need to learn the story, but I feel that the author could have found a different way to do this. Unless, as I do suspect, the author doesn’t particularly like his protagonist.

I was excited to see that the same journalist from the second book has a big role to play. Her background and way of being is just more interesting to me, and I appreciate how she is woven into these stories.

When the twists of this particular story were revealed, I appreciated that while I didn’t figure them out, they weren’t entirely impossible to have sorted out. I don’t read these books in the hopes that I’ll sort out what’s happened; I just like reading stories set in interesting places. So far the outcomes are never totally outside the realm of possibility, but are surprising enough to be fun.