Loved this one! Great and fun read. Highly recommend.
Many thanks to the publisher, Netgalley, and the author for my ARC.

Finchmere - more deadly than Midsomer

This is the sixth and, it appears to be, final book in the Dr Nell Ward series focusing on an ecologist and heiress who always gets drawn into a crime and has to solve it with her ecological knowledge.

This being the sixth outing for the characters there is a lot of backstory and, although you would be able to follow what was going on without having read the first five books. Over the course of the books there has been a lot of development into a cast of nuanced characters.

The book is a combination of both predictive and unpredictable. I thought I knew how the crime was committed from half way through but it wasn't until the big reveal that I actually knew what had happened. Other things were nicely predictable in the way of a cosy mystery. The author treads a careful line avoiding being overly corny as to be corny but without being too gritty to stop being fun.

The only thing I thought was a shame is there is less ecology in this book, some people will like this, but I thought it was a shame as I felt this really brought something unique to the series.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this and I do hope, if the story allows there might be a seventh outing for Nell and co.

This might well be my favourite book in Sarah Yarwood-Lovett's series about Nell Ward. It moves with great pace and has less introspection than some of the other titles. Nell's professional and personal partner Rav has attracted a stalker who, it seems, will stop at nothing to gain his attention - or to remove Nell from his orbit. The police are quickly mobilised and offer (a perhaps unlikely level of) protection and investigation. Of course, the situation comes to a head during a three-day public event on Nell's parents' estate giving rise to a pressure-cooker of a situation. Equally of course, Nell and Rav put themselves in dangerous situations by ignoring the police's instructions. This was the one thing I still found irritating; I actally heard myself shouting out loud at their stupidity! But that aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.