I think this is the second book, following Want to Play?. This one starts off with the apparently inexplicable murders of some elderly men and women. But then it turns out that they have something in common - they're all former inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

I wasn't particularly gripped by this one as a I have been with the two books following this one. Maybe I was just tired when I was reading it so wasn't concentrating properly.

I didn't find the story that plausible - about half-way through, the detectives thought they'd spotted the pattern behind the crimes, and deduced a motive. I thought "aha - in fact, given the evidence so far, there's another possible explanation which would be more interesting", and I mentally settled back to see them work out the solution which I'd predicted. But in fact it turned out they were right: my more plausible storyline never occurred after all. So I think the author missed a trick there.

There was another sort of cameo appearance from the Monkeewrench lot - it seems like with the exception of the first book, these are about the detectives Magozzi and Gino solving cases, with occasional fairy godmother type help from Grace McBride and co., who are always off to solve some other major case but manage to make a bit of time to come up with some killer piece of evidence by using their phenomenally powereful firewall cracking software.

OK I suppose but not great.

Completed : 25-Oct-2009