Cold Pressed by J J Marsh

Cold Pressed by J.J. Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another competent DI Stubbs tale set in a warm country. This time the calm and clever female detective investigates the deaths of women of a certain age onboard a luxury cruise liner criss-crossing the Greek archipelago. As a pure gesture of political goodwill, Beatrice Stubbs, a well-respected Scotland Yard detective, is called in by the Greek authorities to investigate the death of a British eighty-year-old woman, who's fallen off a cliff at a beauty spot in Santorini. Everyone thinks it's a case of death by natural causes, until Beatrice and her young Greek counterpart, DI Stephanakis, start investigating.

Cold Pressed reminded me of Agatha Cristies' novel, Death on the Nile. The novel has the same quality of the luxurious surroundings hiding a raw desire to murder. The author here also has the same eye to detail, some of which turn out to be false and some not so. JJ Marsh keeps the readers guessing right to the moment when the killer(s) is (are) revealed.

But as well as a story about nasty happenings on a luxury cruiser, Cold Pressed is, just as the other Di Stubbs novels, about the complicated personal lives of the two detectives. We learn of the self-doubts of the young, newly promoted, Detective Nikos Stephanakis, and are given very interesting revelations into Beatrice's mind, and her relationship with Matthew, her long-term partner.

I read this book in two days flat, so all I now need is the next Beatrice Stubbs book, please Ms Marsh!



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The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith - review

I was a little disappointed in the second Comoran Strike novel. The plot is well crafted and intricate enough for me not to guess the identity of the perpetrator until the end, but there's something missing from the prose. To me it felt as if J K Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, was already bored with her new characters, in the same way as the detective hero, Comoran Strike, is fed up and frustrated with his physical condition. Comoran is an Afghanistan war veteran with a prosthesis, and his missing leg continues to hamper his surveillance work. He does, however, have some impressive friends in high places, a fact which enables him to catch the killer in the end.

It may be that it's the subject matter of the novel - the literary world - which is making our author yawn. JK Rowling certainly has a go at each role in the publishing world; we have the celebrity-seeking mid-list writer, the ruthless agent, the self-important, successful author, the pathetic self-published writer, the blogger who cannot spell, the eccentric publisher who hates writers...OK, it may be that it was me who resented the literary caricatures.

In spite all of the above, I was keen to get to the end of the book to find out who did the ugly deed, or wether anything romantic will occur between Strike and his beautiful assistant Robin. So, I enjoyed the read, sort of.

The Silkworm is a good, dependable detective tale without too much excitement.

The Silkworm (Comoran Strike Book 2)
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