Serpent's Point: Book 26 in the DI Wesley Peterson crime series

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Despite his interest in archaeology Wesley took the decision to join the police force, although he still retains his interest in archaeology and also his friendship with Neil. When a skeleton is uncovered, the pressure rises to find a killer, and Wesley and Neil realise that Serpent's Point holds more secrets than anyone could have imagined. She worked in teaching, marketing and accountancy before first enjoying writing success as a winner of the North West Playwrights competition.

It turns out that Susan is on a quest to learn more about her friend's husband who has disappeared completely. The book starts with the friend of a woman getting married at the courthouse without family or friends attending. You could easily slip into this series with Serpent's Point because Ellis does a good job of supplying enough backstory to answer questions without bogging down the plot.Meanwhile Neil, Wesley's friend from his days as an anthropology student, is excited to find what looks like the remains of a Roman village and we learn, through letters, that this is not a new discovery. I wouldn't say this story gripped and intrigued me as much as some of the others but still a solid, very readable instalment. When the body of Susan Brown turns up dead, DI Wesley Petersen is set the task of finding her murderer. But as they investigate Susan Brown's life, they discover she was investigating the disappearance and murder of two other women. Then we move forward five years to the discovery of the dead body of a woman probably in her early thirties lying on a costal path.

When two teenage girls take their metal detectors to a field close to the old manor house, their find brings Neil into what could very well be a monumental discovery. Two young girls with metal detectors were looking for treasure in a nearby field but wearing headphones and concentrating on their metal detecting they were unable to offer any useful information. Although I recommend starting at the beginning, I can see where doing that with a (so far) twenty-six-volume series could be daunting. There’s two plots that run alongside one another, one of the main investigation but another of a historical Roman archeological dig that’s occurring, which at first I didn’t like.and, once again, an amazing plot and the connections made between archaeology and the present time and crime are enthrauling.

The plot is simple really and gradually builds up where over the last 100 pages of the book there’s a slow unravel of information. Quite often it can be clunky when there are multiple time lines, but keeping the timeline in the past quite simply narrated really worked well.

As in every book of this series, there's a parallel story involving Wesley's archaeologist friend Neil Watson, who's excavating a possible Roman site near the scene of Susan's murder. The book unfolds naturally and everything feels cohesive rather than forced which is rare to find now! Whether you've read the whole series, or are discovering Kate Ellis's DI Wesley Peterson novels for the first time, this is the perfect page-turner if you love reading Ann Cleeves and Elly Griffiths.

A predator is finding vulnerable women, draining their resources and disposing of them in various ways. Claye's journal entries gave me delicious little shivers because they reminded me so much of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess".

The intermittent excerpts from the 1921 archaeological dig team didn't feel too relevant throughout the book and it didn't have too much impact on the ending which was disappointing. No matter how hard I try, I never figure it all out when I read one of her Wesley Peterson mysteries, and that makes the entire experience such a joy. The number of potential suspects and the work Gerry, Wesley and the rest of the team have to put into whittle them down keeps you guessing to the end. This is extremely difficult to do because author Kate Ellis is one of the best at supplying some first-class misdirection. A complex story, involving the detectives travelling to Yorkshire and the Cotswolds in their efforts to find out the reason for Susan's death.