A Labor of Like

“He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she didn’t.” Truth for many.

49. 12 Still Midnight

This is a new series with a pretty standard female cop, Alex Morrow, trying to push against her all male coworkers while solving murders in cold and gloomy Scotland.  While it felt familiar, I really loved the slow burn here as well as the unraveling of her personal history.  I do think that if I hadn’t read it so quickly, (thank you Labor Day weekend at the grandparents!) I might have been put off by her because she behaves pretty reprehensibly. It is only as the story goes on that we find out why and I think it may have taken a bit too long to get there. Morrow reminded me a bit of Jane Tennyson in Prime Suspect, constantly fighting for respect and against her personal demons, but where Tennyson’s life is constantly getting worse and worse I liked seeing that most of Marrow’s relationships, while strained, remained hopeful.

My main issue was that the story alternates between Marrow’s POV and the criminals’, leaving very little of the mystery to puzzle out for the reader and that always makes things a bit less intriguing.  I also think its conclusion could have been done a bit better; the pieces kind of fell together rather than being deduced. I did go in knowing this was the first in a new series and in a lot of ways it is written as an introduction and thus felt a bit incomplete. I look forward to the next book and fleshing out the characters a bit more but if you were not planning to read on I think you might find the characters and story a bit flat.