What makes a good murder mystery/police procedural? Is it unpredictable twists and turns that keep your head spinning and lead you off in every possible wrong direction? Some writers would have you believe that. Sharon Bolton, however, does not rely on any such trick. There are twists, certainly, but they act as a sort of sleight of hand; you puzzle over and predict those while some small but important distinction goes unnoticed until the twist is revealed to be exactly what you guessed - with a catch.

I read The Craftsman recently, which was my first Bolton book, and I loved the writing, the characters, the construction of scenes, but the structure and the ending soured my view of the book as a whole. Not so with Daisy in Chains. The structure (traditional chapters cut with letters, emails, and transcripts) enhanced the strength of the story and ramped up the mystery without Bolton having to address them directly until the plot and characters were ready to handle them.

Maggie Rose and Hamish Wolfe aren't your typical main duo. Indeed, normally a crime novel would pair the lawyer with the cop instead of the killer. Instead, we have these two incredibly smart characters working against three people's justice. And boy do they complement each other! Despite one character being confined to prison, the mystery spirals out into a larger and larger scope, even as we hit successive dead ends. The ending is one of those surprises that, upon a moment of shocked consideration, actually makes perfect sense; it still has that feeling of a twist but it isn't random or baseless or cheap. This is what an ending should be.

This definitely won't be my last Bolton.