Meh. That pretty much sums up my reaction to this book. It's not bad, but that's because it hasn't got enough personality to be bad. It's just bland.
The main character is a middle-aged lady named Fran who gets psychic impressions and has previously helped the police with two murder cases. This time an inspector Fran has worked with before asks her to look into the family background of a woman who discovers a body in thederelict theatre she's inherited from an aunt she never knew she had. Now, I don't normally have a problem with psychic characters feeling a bit ambivalent about their "gift', but Fran is so wishy-washy about it that you just want to slap her with a wet haddock and tell her to grow a spine. Her constant bleating that the murder case was none of her business was really getting on my nerves before I was halfway through the book.
Most of the other characters are boring, dull and hard to tell apart and the gay characters, while sympathetically portrayed, were, I felt, quite badly stereotyped - calling people "dearie" and having a wardrobe full of pink shirts and leather trousers....
I thought the mystery itself was badly explained - I was still uncertain about the family relationships that triggered the murder even after it had all been resolved, but perhaps that was because it was all so dull that I'd stopped paying proper attention by then.
That'll teach me to break my own rules about not reading series out of sequence. No more Lesley Cookson for me, thanks.
