The Blood Card by Elly Griffiths - Review

It's no secret that Elly Griffiths is one of my favourite novelists. I really like her Ruth Galloway novels, which are set in modern times and focus on Ruth, an archaelogist, who is asked to help the police on a number of investigations. I love them, so when I first heard that Elly was writing a new series set in the 50s I was excited to read them. This is the third one in the series and I've read all three. I think this is the best one, actually!

The series focusses on Edgar and Max. Edgar is a policeman in Brighton, but in the war he was part of the Magic Men, an elite group trying to fool the Nazis in Norway. Also part of the group was Max, who is a magician. In the first novel we see the two of them reunite after several years not seeing each other, and Max helps Edgar solve a crime relating to someone else who was in the Magic Men.

In this novel, a Roma fortune teller has been killed and her death has been put down as an accident, but Edgar isn't sure that it was. It's the eve of the queen's coronation in 1953 and there's some concern that there is a threat there. Then a general comes to ask Edgar and Max for their help looking at the death of a colonel that he thinks might be linked, and there's still the mystery of the fortune teller's death to deal with.

I like Edgar, he's pretty reliable and down to earth, and I like him as a narrator. Max's points of view can sometimes irritate, especially when it comes to his daughter, Ruby, who is Edgar's fiancee but who is in show business like Max, but he's basically a good person and I like him. In this book we also got the point of view of Edgar's sergeant, Emma, who is a really good egg, I like her a lot.

I figured out some of the twists in this but there was a really good one that I thought was brilliant and which I didn't see coming. It's all about magic and sleight of hand and I really liked it. It's not a perfect book by any means, but I did like it. I can't wait to read the next one!