★★★★★
By Sheila Connolly
Snow is a rarity in Maura Donovan’s small village in County Cork, Ireland, so she wasn’t sure what to expect when a major snowstorm rolled in around Sullivan’s pub. But now she’s stranded in a bar full of patrons–and a suspected killer in a long-ago murder.
Maura’s been in Ireland less than a year and hasn’t heard about the decades-old unsolved crime that took place nearby, let alone the infamous suspect, Diane Caldwell. But the locals have, and they’re not happy to be trapped with her. Diane, meanwhile, seeks to set the record straight, asserting her innocence after all this time. And since no one is going anywhere in the storm, Maura encourages Diane to share her side of the story, which she’d never had a chance to do in court.
Over the next few hours, the informal court in Sullivan’s reviews the facts and theories about the case–and comes to some surprising conclusions. But is it enough to convince the police to take a new look at an old case? A clever spin on the classic locked room mystery, Cruel Winter, the fifth in New York Timesbestselling author Sheila Connolly’s series, will delight fans of the Emerald Isle.
My review
I started reading the book once and stopped after a few pages because it was too slow for me. During our summer holidays, I decided to give it another try and ended up loving it. Most of the book happens in a 24 period during a snowstorm in the south of Ireland and I felt like I was sitting with them in the dark pub trying to figure out who has committed the murder many years ago. I read this book in front of a turf fire with the wind howling around our cottage and the waves crashing into the rocks just below the cottage on the coast of Donegal and it was the perfect book for this moment. It is part of a series and I haven’t read the other ones. There are some elements which seem to be part of a bigger story connecting the different books, but I think the book was well rounded in itself and works as a stand alone.
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