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Synopsis: After a captain in Her Majesty’s Guard and his young wife are brutally murdered in their flat, master sleuth Colin Pendragon and his partner Ethan Pruitt are summoned to Buckingham Palace. Major Hampstead demands discretion at all costs to preserve the reputation of the Guard and insists Pendragon participate in the cover-up by misleading the press. In response, Pendragon makes the bold claim that he will solve the case in no more than three days’ time or he will oblige the major and compromise himself.

Racing against the clock – and thwarted at every turn by their Scotland Yard nemesis Inspector Emmett Varcoe – Pendragon and Pruitt begin to assemble the clues around the grisly homicide, probing into private lives and uncovering closely guarded secrets. As the minutes tick away, the pressure – and the danger – mounts as Pendragon’s integrity is on the line and a cold-blooded killer remains on the streets..

Me: This is the second Colin Pendragon mystery and I’m wondering if maybe I should have found the first before before I embarked on this story. There are one or two things that may have been introduced which would help me to have enjoyed the story more such as the backstory of Pendragon and his aide/partner Pruitt and the bloody annoying twiddling of a coin and the reasons behind it. I did wonder why there was mention of the relationship between the two men as it was downplayed so much but it does play a part of the ending and big reveal where certain thing suddenly make a lot more sense.

I surprised myself today by blasting through the last 50% of the book as it’s taken me since August 2015 to get this far. I think that’s one of the main problems. It’s not a book you need to keep reading. When you put it down to do something else it’s easy to forget about it and start reading something else.

It’s also a bit long. There’s a bit at the end where Mrs Behmoth, the landlady says ‘Yer always use too many words’… and that’s my other gripe. The books was too long. There’s a subplot involving dog-napping that would better suit a separate short story and I would have been happy not to have read.

That aside it’s not a bad book, the characters are all well rounded and any bits that I may not have understood were all tied up at the end quite satisfactorily. I really should try and get the first book as I liked the bits of history of Pruitt and would like to know more (I have the 3rd book so may get my wish)

All in all a thumbs in the middle.

I received a free ARC of this book from netgalley in return for an honest review