DC Morgan Series: The Last Party, A Game of Lies, Other People’s Houses, By Clare Mackintosh
October is Mystery Month! Mysteries are my go-to genre, and have been for years. While this last year, I have opened my reading spectrum to include cozy fantasy and “romantasy,” which I am loving, I will still pick up a mystery to devour absolutely anytime!
I am smack in the middle of Clare Mackintosh’s DC Morgan trilogy and loving every second of it. The series starts with The Last Party, where we meet DC Ffion Morgan at a New Year’s Eve party, making some fabulously questionable decisions that lead to a wonderfully uncomfortable first day back at work in North Wales on the border to England, with a beautiful lake dividing the two countries, and constantly bringing them together as well.
Primarily set in the village of Cuwm Coed, where Ffion was born and has lived with her mam and her much younger sister, Seren. We get to meet many of the local villagers and a host of second-home owners down from London in the new resort built on the lakeside.
Mystery, intrigue, and love abound as Ffion and her English counterpart, DS Leo Brady, try to solve the mystery of a local celeb’s death. Written so that we get to hear the story from the character’s points of view, we get to know Ffion as a hilarious, somewhat chaotic thirty-something trying to get past her divorce and out from under her mother’s close watch and village spies.
Book two kicks off with Ffion in new digs, with the most ridiculous dog you’ll ever meet and a new case to solve. Still reeling from some of the twists revealed in The Last Party, The Game of Lies barely gives us a chance to sort ourselves out before Ffion is back at her hilarious, chaos-driven way of plodding on and through life and work.
Set on their mountain that backs the lake, a reality TV show has set up a camp and has barely started filming when the producer changes the plot on the contestants, and the whole situation goes sideways. I am not only reading this book, I am listening to it on LibroFM (you can support your local bookstore by listening to LibroFM if audiobooks are your thing), while I’m out walking or driving, because I am so excited to figure out what happens and I don’t want to put it down for a minute.
The third book in the series is called Other People’s Houses. I’m looking forward to seeing how this cast of characters’ worlds will collide once again from Wales to England and how they will sort out who does what, how they all feel about one another and how the drama that has unfolded in the first two books will end up, or if (and this is what I am hoping for) there will be another book.
Happy Reading, Book Lovers!
Courtney Allen is the manager at Golden’s Four Points Books. Read her other book reviews here:
Book review: “These Summer Storms”
Four Points Book Review: Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister
Four Points Book Review: Broomsticks and Bestsellers, Witchy Reads for fall