The Shadow of Memory by Connie Berry – a Review

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Description:
As Kate Hamilton plans her upcoming wedding to Detective Inspector Tom Mallory, she is also assisting her colleague Ivor Tweedy with a project at the Netherfield Sanatorium, which is being converted into luxury townhouses. Kate and Ivor must appraise a fifteenth-century painting and verify that its provenance is the Dutch master Jan Van Eyck. But when retired criminal inspector Will Parker is found dead, Kate learns that the halls of the sanatorium housed much more than priceless art.

Kate is surprised to learn that Will had been the first boyfriend of her friend Vivian Bunn, who hasn’t seen him in fifty-eight years. At a seaside holiday camp over sixty years ago, Will, Vivian, and three other teens broke into an abandoned house where a doctor and his wife had died under bizarre circumstances two years earlier. Now, when a second member of the childhood gang dies unexpectedly—and then a third—it becomes clear that the teens had discovered more in the house than they had realized.

Had Will returned to warn his old love? When Kate makes a shocking connection between a sixty-year-old murder and the long-buried secrets of the sanatorium, she suddenly understands that time is running out for Vivian—and anyone connected to her.

Review:

The Shadow of Memory by Connie Berry is the 4^th book in her Kate Hamilton Mysteries series.  This is the first book I have read by this author, and I really enjoyed it very much. The cozy mystery read very well as a standalone, with details of the main characters giving us a wonderful background.  I plan to read more about Kate Hamilton and adding Connie Berry to my list of authors I want to read.

Kate Hamilton, our heroine, is a visiting American antiques dealer currently living in Suffolk in the small village of Long Barston. She is a widow with two grown up children, and is now engaged to Englishman DI Tom Mallory; they are still in the process of planning where they want to live. Kate is currently working with antiques dealer Ivor Tweedy, arranging an auction for valuable antiques belonging to the Netherfield Sanatorium, which is being converted to deluxe apartments.  One of the main items is a painting that is valued to be in the millions; with Kate and Ivor appraising the originality of the item.

Kate and two friends, out for the evening and taking a short cut home, come across a body of an elderly man, who is dead.  The dead man was identified to be Will Parker, and old friend of Vivian (one of Kate’s local friends), she has not seen this man in more than sixty years.  Kate will learn from Vivian about what happened all those years ago, when a group of them spent a week at Hopley’s Holiday camp, with five of them going to a local house belonging to the Beaufoy family, where the parents died suddenly, and they decided to be sleuths playing the game ‘clue’. After Ivor (with Kate’s help) hypnotizes Vivian to remember all she could back to the past, detailing that they put all their clues in a metal box. Now it appears someone in the present is wanting to find that box, and why was Will Parker trying to visit Vivian?

Kate works with Tom, trying to investigate what turns out to be Will’s murder; and as time goes on, the other 4 people seem to be targeted.  While Tom does his police investigation, Kate and Vivian travel to meet family members of the other possible targets; learning several of the former teen group have recently died.

What follows is an excellent mystery tying in the poisoned deaths of the Beaufoy parents years ago; what is in the missing box, and how the current painting was part of the past.   I really thought Kate was a fabulous heroine, and loved her relationship with Tom; hoping in the next book Kate and Tom do marry.  I also enjoyed many of the local secondary characters, as well as the wonderful village.  The Shadow of Memory was a cozy, fun and entertaining story line, with a number of surprising twists.  The Shadow of Memory was very well written by Connie Berry, and read very well as a standalone.  I look forward to reading the next book in this series.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher