Fans of British crime novels may have noticed that one part of Great Britain is underrepresented. Helping to redress the balance is Clare Mackintosh (I Let You Go), an English writer who lives in Wales, the part-time setting of Other People's Houses, the uncommonly adroit third title in the Detective Constable Ffion Morgan series.
Other People's Houses begins with North Wales Police's DC Ffion Morgan learning that a dead female body has been found in a kayak that was stolen from a rafting center; meanwhile, Ffion's English boyfriend, Detective Sergeant Leo Brady of the Cheshire Criminal Investigation Department, learns of a burglary on the Hill, the Park Avenue of Tattenbrook, West Cheshire. It's the second burglary on the Hill in six months, which wouldn't be noteworthy if on both occasions the thief hadn't skipped over valuables in favor of making off with a few small, inconsequential-seeming items.
Ffion's and Leo's separate investigations come together more easily than their separate cultural identities (Leo is learning Welsh to placate Ffion's mother): as it turns out, the murdered woman was an estate agent who had a connection to the Hill, as does Leo's social-climbing ex-wife. (There's a solid running gag about her insistence that living around the corner from the Hill amounts to Hill-resident status.) Other People's Houses incorporates all these story strands into a latticework, a feat as impressive as Mackintosh's other major accomplishment: convincing readers that the irascible Ffion (whose "preferred communication method" is arguing, according to one colleague) is worthy of Leo's starry-eyed devotion. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer