Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Murder at Midnight" by Faith Martin

Former DI Hillary Greene, now a civilian working with the Thames Valley Police on cold cases, is back from two weeks of vacation. She needed it, after that close call with the stalker in the previous three mysteries. She spent one week with her boss, who’s becoming something more than a love interest, and the second week on her own in Spain.

Now she’s back in the office, with two new team members. One is a sociology student who dresses in Goth style, and the other is Boy Wonder – an entrepreneur who drives a Jaguar and has more money that the police force put together. His reason for joining the force is “to give something back to society.” Well, yes, but Hillary isn’t buying it.

The new cold concerns the murder of an interior designer at an end-of-the-millennium party in 1999. Everyone liked him. He had no enemies, or skeletons in his closet. He did great work for his clients. No one gained financial benefits from his death. Everybody misses him.

Faith Martin

It’s a tough case for Hillary and her team to crack. And she has to keep a close eye on Boy wonder and what he might be up to, like why he hacked into her office computer after hours (and he doesn’t know he got caught).

Murder at Midnight is the 15^th DI Hillary Greene mystery, and it’s a corker. You keep thinking author Faith Martin had to come up with a mediocre one at some point, but so far, across 15 books, she hasn’t missed a beat.

In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.