Over the last four years, I’ve read and relished four M. W. Craven mystery novels starring grouchy but brilliant Investigator Washington Poe and his awkward super nerd Tilly Bradshaw (these links are to my four reviews, uniformly rated as 8/10): The Puppet Show, Black Summer, Dead Ground, and The Botanist. There are not many genre series whose instalments I snap up on the day of publication, but this is one, and The Mercy Chair did not disappoint. In this outing, a religious zealot from a cult is found stoned to death and the case soon becomes related, somehow, to the slaughter of a family by a daughter many years ago. By definition, the Poe/Bradshaw cases involve multiple gruesome killings, but The Mercy Chair is perhaps the darkest to date, and the plot twists, superbly cunning as is usual with this author, border on the outrageous (you’ll know what I mean when you read the book), so when I finished it, a couple of days after page one, I felt both refreshed but also unsettled. Longtime series can become pastiches unless the core characters suffer and learn, and I sense that this series has settled down into quirkiness, stylistics, and plot pyrotechnics. This is a minor quibble: I recommend you snap up the six books and clap hands with delight.
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