Witty Little Knitter

I am weak I know...I wanted to safe this for the holidays but after all the tragedy and drama in Elizabeth George and Friedrich Ani, which I read recently I needed something to cheer me up.

I was admittedly a bit worried before I had even started reading as I had just discuverd Lanyon's Holmes and Moriarity-series about a mystery-writer and an ex-cop, while Adrien English is about a bookseller/mystery-writer and a still-cop...I feared some character-recycling. As it turns out I needn't have worried. I guess Adrien and Christopher would get on quite well with each other but they defenitely don't seem like copies of each other.

Now for the book...unfortunately I had stumbled over a spoiler in one of the reviews of the later Adrien-mysteries so I knew quite early who the killer was and I do think that even without that I would have had a suspicion quite early...though not so much a 'God, this guy is running around with a blinking neon-sign SUSPECT, why is every character in the book too stupid to realize that?'-suspicion, rather a 'I have read enough mysteries, I know how they work'-suspicion.
But even with my early suspicions about the bad guy I still enjoyed the book a lot, thanks to all the charming characters. Adrien is just adorable and lovely and I also enjoyed reading about Lisa ("overprotective mother" is a kind of worn-out trope in mysteries and it can very easily go wrong and make the character incredibly annoying if she appears too often, Lisa appears just enough to make you chuckle when you imagine Adrien's desperate reaction to her suggestions). Adrien's new shop-assistant really hadn't enough screen-time yet but he could develop in a great character, too.