Death & the Gravedigger's Angel (An Auction Block Mystery #3) by Loretta Ross

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My Rating: 3 Stars

A fun cosy-mystery, good for a quick read. This was the first volume I’ve read from “An Auction Block Mystery” and I want to take a look at the previous novels of the collection to see what I’ve missed. I must say that having a character named Death is peculiar and actually compliments the story very nicely.

The mystery starts with the beginning of an investigation. Apparently, a drunken old man stole a horse and dressed in a cavalry uniform got into a fatal accident in the forest when he hit his head against a branch. When the results of the lab come in, it’s revealed that the uniform in saturated with decomposing body fluid, meaning the uniform belonged to someone that has been dead for quite a while. Meanwhile, Death is asked to look into a homicide. The son of Tyler Jones, head of a radical church group, is found dead in the back of the car of Anthony Dozier, an army vet recovering from the horrors of the war in Afghanistan. The motive? Earlier that day, Jones and his group invaded the funeral of Dozier’s Muslim wife. Death’s job is to prove that Dozier committed the murder while suffering from PTSD. At the same time, Wren is helping out on preparing a house for auction when strange noises and events start happening all around her. 

The style of writing is great, very engaging and witty. The descriptions are brief but they hold enough detail to be able to picture the settings and the environment.

It’s the type of story I couldn’t guess what would happen next. Information and details are revealed in a steady pace and at the beginning I couldn’t see the relation between them. It all worked out perfectly in the end though. Since I didn’t read the previous books, I felt like I was missing something, more in the relationships between the characters than anything else. The characters are good, but I was a bit disappointed not to have some more depth to them, to know more about them, especially Randy. Death is a great character and I loved to see the interactions with his brother Randy. I think they’re really different from each other but even so I could see they had each other’s backs.

A cosy-mystery perfect for an after-work evening!

Thank you NetGalley, the publisher Midnight Ink. and the author for allowing me to read and review a digital copy of this book.

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