One major disadvantage of picking up a new mystery author in the middle of their series is that the soap opera aspect of the detective's life, which rewards faithful readers who have read from the beginning, can seem obtrusive or tacked on. In this book, there's a great chunk of resolution from the case in the last book - a case that had large personal repercussions, including apparently the murder of Inspector Mariner's estranged father - that seems to be just dropped like a rather indigestible lump into the middle of the far less personal kidnapping-baby-factory-murder case that is the ostensible focus of this mystery. That notwithstanding, I quite liked Mariner and his team, including his sympathetic female superior. I may return to this series.
