Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but there seems to be a vogue for calling characters just by their first names these days. But when we’re strangers, as we are to characters, we don’t often go straight to first names, do we? Yet, after reading many books, I have a hard time finding the main characters’ last names. This time, I had to look it up.
Jake Jackson has retired early from being a police detective because of the combination of a separation from his wife and an inheritance from his uncle. He has been left a house in the isolated countryside, not even a road to it, and quite a bit of money, his uncle wanting to give him the gift of solitude. The name of the house is Little Sky.
There were a few things about this house that I found hard to believe, since parts of it are very old and it is huge, so presumably at one time had servants. First, why is there no road to it if it’s been there a long time? How was it built? How did they get furniture to it? Second, why are there no bathing facilities? Third, why no laundry, however primitive? Even a rustic abode would have a big metal tub for baths and a place to wash clothes.
These are nitpicks, you might think, but then, of course, Abell needs his hero to live in a perfectly remote area (it could have been an island, Stig, that would be believable), he wants his scene where Jake is caught in the nude after his morning swim (Stig, he can swim even if he has a bathroom), but that doesn’t really explain the laundry.
Oh well. So, Jake begins living in this house, mostly being by himself but slowly getting to know his neighbors. His closest neighbor is the local vet, Livia. Livia what? I don’t know. No last names are exchanged. You can tell I find this irritating. Livia is a lovely mixed-race woman with a little girl named Diana. Jake is immediately interested. Since his home also has no phone or reception, Livia gets to take him by surprise when he is swimming nude.
One thing Livia does is encourage him to participate in a local custom, a hunt for St. Aethelmere’s bones. The local storekeeper hides a bag of sticks marked “bones,” and there’s a contest to see who can find it, if anyone can. Jake finds the bones, but they turn out to be really bones, and human, as judged by Livia and the local biologist, Dr. Peter.
Jake reports the bones to the police, and he meets the local man, Chief Inspector Gerald Watson, who seems happy to have Jake poke around and try to figure out who the bones might belong to. They are of a woman in her thirties and are about 10 years old. A look through his uncle’s old newspapers provides a possible name, that of Sabine Rohmer, a foreign farmworker who fell from a tower on the farm where she had worked for years. The death had been ruled misadventure.
However, when the police examine Sabine’s grave, they find bones in it. Watson seems inclined to think the whole thing is a wild goose chase, but Jake convinces him that perhaps Sabine’s death was not an accident, because someone, hearing the grave would be exhumed, has hastened to put bones in it to throw them off, and as it turns out, the bones in the grave are too old to be Sabine’s.
Jake’s investigations turn up little cooperation, just hostility, threats, and violence, principally from the people on Smith’s farm where Sabine had worked and from some lay-abouts and nogoodniks around the village, including Sabine’s old boyfriend, a man named Rose. Then Dr. Peter, who has been helping Jake, is killed.
This novel is really more of an action book than a mystery, as we’re given no hints to the identity of the killer until the same second Jake figures it out. And, although I don’t fall into the camp that believes mystery and romance don’t mix, I think there was too much emphasis on the romance, and it was a clunky one, with scenes that Abell obviously found sexy but left me cold. Usually, women who are trying to develop a relationship slowly because of their child don’t engage in salacious banter at an early meeting, even if they see a guy naked.
The novel is a very slow developer, which I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the descriptions of the countryside and the work Jake does to improve his property. However, my comments above have me wondering how interested I am in reading the second book in the series.
What? Me Read? 
I enjoyed this one considerably more than you. However if you felt the balance towards romance was too strong in this one then you’d find that even more in the next couple. They went downhill badly for me. The second one was just OK, but the third one bored me – repeating all the back to nature stuff yet again and even more of his and Livia’s sex life! I think I’m done with them now.
Oh dear. Maybe I won’t continue.