Wicked Women (D.I. Kim Stone #23), by Angela Marsons
Wicked Women by Angela Marsons My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Wicked Women” is one of those rare long-running-series instalments that makes you feel, within a handful of pages, that you have come home. As the twenty-third novel in the Detective Kim Stone series , it has every right to coast on familiar beats, but it does the opposite. Angela Marsons drops you straight back into Kim Stone’s world with that familiar, brisk authority - sharp observation, sharper dialogue, and a case that refuses to sit still. The premise flirts with witchcraft, but the book’s real trick is how elegantly it keeps the supernatural at arm’s length: present as culture, performance, fear, and suggestion, yet never allowed to bulldoze the procedural logic. Like Kim, I do not believe in witches, and I loved how the novel leans into that scepticism while staying delightfully ambiguous. » ‘But no one really believes in them,’ Kim stated. « That line sets the tone: we are here for evidence, motives, and human choices, ...