![\"\"](\"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/lost-lake-198x300.jpg\")
Three books into her series about Detective Gemma Monroe, I am already so smitten that this series belongs alongside favorite series of mine by Sarah Stewart Taylor, Elly Griffiths, Ellen Hart and Julia Spencer-Fleming.\u00a0 All of these writers \u2013 including Littlejohn \u2013 create a rich setting, and populate their unique settings or occupations with even richer characters and stories.\u00a0 All of them feature extremely strong women as their core characters.<\/p>\n
Gemma lives in a smallish Colorado Mountain town \u2013 but still big enough to have some skiing and some cultural life \u2013 and her life is complicated.\u00a0 Like a real person\u2019s life is complicated.\u00a0 She has beloved grandparents who raised her, but her grandmother suffers from dementia; she has a baby she loves and is engaged to the baby\u2019s father, but she\u2019s conflicted about him because of a past affair; and her relationship with her partner, Finn, can be prickly. Oh, and the police department is dealing with a leaker.<\/p>\n
The book focuses on two story threads.\u00a0 One involves a woman who has disappeared while out camping with her friends on the shore of the remote Lost Lake; and the other, a dead museum director, is found strangled in her office the night after a gala.\u00a0 This is a pretty traditional set up and Littlejohn is extremely deft working within the confines of genre protocol.<\/p>\n
She is really good at creating a mystery with not a ton of characters and making the reader doubt each \u2013 or at least several of them \u2013 in turn, which is an absolutely golden age skill.\u00a0 What\u2019s updated about her books is the character development. Gemma is so three dimensional, so fleshed out, and still, as a reader, you feel like there\u2019s more to find out about her. What\u2019s a better mystery than that?<\/p>\n
In all three of these novels the prose itself is lovely, crisp, evocative, and memorable.\u00a0 In the first two there was an element of a case in the past that\u2019s almost mythic and this novel is no different, as the \u201cGirls of Lost Lake\u201d are referenced. \u00a0They were a group of young girls who all died tragically in the Lake many years in the past.\u00a0 In the first two books, the mythic parts of the stories were a larger element and my only caveat with this excellent novel was that the \u201cLost Lake Girls\u201d weren\u2019t a bigger element in this story.<\/p>\n
That said, I\u2019ve read few better plotted mysteries this year, and I loved the look at the many suspects Gemma and Finn track down.\u00a0 I could not stop reading.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three books into her series about Detective Gemma Monroe, I am already so smitten that this series belongs alongside favorite series of mine by Sarah Stewart Taylor, Elly Griffiths, Ellen Hart and Julia Spencer-Fleming.\u00a0 All of these writers \u2013 including Littlejohn \u2013 create a rich setting, and populate their unique settings or occupations with even … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32,31,33,8],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-colorado","tag-gemma-monroe","tag-museums","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2731,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions\/2731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}