Murder on a Winter Afternoon - Betty Rowlands

Murder on a Winter Afternoon by Betty Rowlands
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These Mel Craig Mysteries just get better and better, I don't know if it's because I know the character a little better with each one. This book has, like the last one, a bit of an art theme going on. It's a bit of a different situation to in the previous book, but is interesting and works well all the same.
You might expect that by the third book, Mel might have been a bit more on the ball with this mystery. Mel is a mystery novelist herself, which is part of the reason that she gets involved in all of these crimes in the first place, so she should surely be able to solve things reasonably easy. In this book, she doesn't spot what I felt was fairly obvious though. I don't know if the mystery would have worked so well if she had, so I'll let her off, I was getting a little stressed and wanting to give her a shake.
One of the great things about reading a series is that you get to see the characters develop over time. In this instalment we see the development of a relationship that grew a little in the last book, I wonder if we'll see more of this in subsequent books?
The only slightly annoying thing about this series is that on the one hand, it is quintessentially English, but the book must have been prepared for the American market. There are a few too many cell phones and cookies for my liking that just detract very slightly from that British setting. Overall though, this is a great classic mystery series and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the books.

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