Refreshing, interesting, and great puzzle

It’s VERY refreshing to read a novel in which some characters JUST HAPPEN to be gay!!! 😊😊😊 (U might disagree, saying “No, there’s the Matthew Venn novels!” [HUGE endorsement from me, btw; read those books; they’re great, and, so far, BritBox has done a GREAT job adapting them to a tv series 😊] However, Matthew being gay is INTEGRAL to the plots of at least a couple/few of the novels.)

Overall, the characters in report for murder are realistically complex, with human weaknesses and contradictions 👍🏻

Also, since the novels begin approximately 40 years ago, it’s neat to see/learn (or remember, for some of us 😉) how very different many aspects of life (including access to information, and the ability to take actions without worrying about there being a recording of them, to name just a couple) when there were no cellphones, no ubiquitous CCTV cameras, no Internet (CERN’s nascent network wasn’t completed until the end of 1990, and it was more than a few years before the general population used the World Wide Web in any significant numbers), no email, no computers in general use other than ones that were extremely limited compared to today’s [2024] (and even then, far fewer households contained personal computers), and no digital files to read and/or view.

Oh, yes, and when it seemed like everybody smoked 😉 (Today, there are still many parts of the world that appear similar, and various regions such as Europe where, while not seeming like “everybody” smokes, a higher percentage of the population smokes vs. those in Canada and the U.S. Although, sadly, vaping has reintroduced teens to the idea that smoking can be acceptable to many 😰😡)

Oh! And, VERY believable process of investigating and theorizing, with a VERY believable “whodunnit” 😊

I’m awarding only 4 stars to the narrator/performer, because some of her characters sound similar enough to cause confusion as to which one is speaking, at times.

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