It’s the Advent season, a few weeks before Christmas. Detective Chief Inspector John Shadow finds himself, rather grumpily, at an Advent worship service at York Minster. He’s with friends and colleagues; his assistant, Detective Sergeant Jimmy Chang, is getting married in a few days to the assistant medical examiner.
The Minster has a new dean, a woman, which hasn’t set well with some in the York community; the dean’s been receiving hate mail. At the reception following the service, she collapses after drinking some wine; her husband recognizes an allergic reaction to nuts and uses the EpiPen he always keeps nearby. The dean recovers, but DCI Shadow also noticed something off about the wine.
The wine itself is something that is personally painful for Shadow. It’s made the family of the girl he loved and lost in a pedestrian traffic fatality decades earlier. Shadow never married; he was never even much interested in relationships at all after the death of his fiancée. He’d left London after her death and moved to York; he still lives in the boat they shared.
He and DS Chang investigate where the wine came from – a relatively new shop run by two young men who seem to know little about the wine business. Then a young woman from Slovenia who worked at the shop as a cleaner is found dead, the investigation of watered down or fake wine became a murder inquiry. And this one seems to have ties to organized crime.
H L Marsay
A Christmas Shadow is the sixth and, so far, last in the DCI John Shadow series by British author H L Marsay. It has all the elements of its predecessors – an interesting mystery, a DCI who likes his food (he eats out a lot), an overly enthusiastic assistant who often drives Shadow to distraction, and an abundance of suspects. It also has more of the back story on Shadow’s ill-fated romance, with his former fiancee’s younger brother coming to York to help deal with what is happening with his wine. And there’s a hint of a future mystery, with Shadow accepting the brother’s invitation to spend Christmas in Italy with his family.
Marsay is the author of six mystery novels in the DCI John Shadow series. Set in York, the characteristic features of each of the stories are a curmudgeonly DCI, his irrepressibly cheerful sergeant, a culinary tour of the city restaurants, café, and pubs (some of which actually exist), and an introduction to York’s colorful history and present. A member of the Crime Writers Association, she lives with her family in the city of York in England.
Related:
A Viking’s Shadow by H L Marsay.
A Ghostly Shadow by H L Marsay.
A Roman Shadow by H.L. Marsay.
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