{"id":6730,"date":"2025-11-18T06:50:38","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T14:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6730"},"modified":"2025-11-19T05:15:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T13:15:49","slug":"connie-berry-a-grave-deception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/connie-berry-a-grave-deception\/","title":{"rendered":"Connie Berry: A Grave Deception"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kate Hamilton #6<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To me this series is an absolute bingeable dream.\u00a0 If your taste runs to a gentle British police mystery featuring an antiques specialist, these are the books for you.\u00a0 In the first book in the series (A Dream of Death<\/em>), 40 something heroine Kate Hamilton, an American antiques dealer, is in the UK to repair her relationship with her dead husband\u2019s sister and she gets more than she bargained for.\u00a0 In the course of the series she meets her new husband (by book six they are happily married newlyweds).\u00a0 In each novel, there\u2019s an unusual antiquity or archaeological find that holds the threads of the plot together.<\/p>\n

In this latest book, that binder is the discovery of a corpse in a site near Kate\u2019s home in Long Barston, one that dates from the 14th century.\u00a0 Because of the way the body was wrapped, it\u2019s almost perfectly preserved, and Kate and her business partner, Ivor Tweedy, have been asked to assess the \u201cgrave goods\u201d or the items the woman was buried with. (Berry based this discovery on a real one, and there\u2019s a note about that discovery at the end of the book).<\/p>\n

One of the items is an incredible pearl, and when Kate sees it, she has a violent reaction as she does with many of the objects from the past she deals with.\u00a0 In the pearl she senses trauma and terror.\u00a0 The reactions she has are so intense she can\u2019t stop thinking about them, but she\u2019s yet to share this special skill (if that\u2019s the correct term) with her new husband.\u00a0 In any case, the pearl as well as the woman\u2019s body compel Kate to be fully invested in the dig, and even more so when a fresh body is discovered.<\/p>\n

Kate\u2019s expertise has earned her a consultancy with a detective agency, and when her combined skills of antiquities expertise and detection are needed, she\u2019s assigned a job.\u00a0 In this novel, the job request comes from the wealthy owner of the manor near the dig, who asks her to try and discover the long-ago dead woman\u2019s identity.\u00a0 The man has his own well of grief \u2013 his beloved wife disappeared a decade ago.\u00a0 As Kate gently investigates the relationships between the archaeologists trying to discern the dead woman\u2019s identity, she shakes loose more than a few long-buried secrets.<\/p>\n

These are books to pick up if you enjoy the main characters (I do); the description of village life and of Kate and Ivor\u2019s antique business; the pubs and the food within the pubs; and the descriptions of the British countryside.\u00a0 To this long time anglophile, that combination \u2013 along with the clever and resonant mysteries Berry provides \u2013 are absolute catnip.\u00a0 When I stumbled across book five last year I went back and read the entire series, something I almost never do, because my reading list is usually so long.\u00a0 Reader, I whipped through all of them, hungry for more.\u00a0 This is a worthy addition in the saga of Kate Hamilton, and I cannot wait for the next one. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate Hamilton #6 To me this series is an absolute bingeable dream.\u00a0 If your taste runs to a gentle British police mystery featuring an antiques specialist, these are the books for you.\u00a0 In the first book in the series (A Dream of Death), 40 something heroine Kate Hamilton, an American antiques dealer, is in the … 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":[2311,113,136,1722,943,1723,1276,1436],"class_list":["post-6730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-a-grave-deception","tag-archeology","tag-british-village","tag-connie-berry","tag-crooked-lane-books","tag-kate-hamilton","tag-robin-agnew","tag-traditional-detection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730","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=6730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6732,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions\/6732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}