A WI meeting ends in murder. The victim does not seem to be popular but who wanted her dead? DCI Jude Satterthwaite is called in to investigate but it means confronting a figure from his past…
Death on a Monday Night is the 8th book in the Jude Satterthwaite series but would work as a standalone novel.
Jude’s personal life and relationships are once again important to the plot as he is dating a fellow officer, has an ex who finds the body, and an old enemy is a suspect. He needs to carefully negotiate these relationships and not let his feelings influence his investigation.
Grace is the victim. She has strained relationships with her family, even bordering on estrangement. Their opinions of her do not make us sympathetic towards her. But as Jude investigates, he finds that Grace had a confrontation with the former drug dealer Adam. His own history with Adam creates a conflict of interest and mixed emotions which felt realistic and made him more human.
The book is written in the third person to allow us to see various perspectives. I found the pace to be carefully balanced: fast enough to move the plot along but slow enough to engage with the characters.
Death on a Monday Night is an enjoyable police procedural and I enjoyed the plotlines surrounding the personal life of the main detective.
An ex-convict. A dead body. A Women’s Institute meeting like no other…
It’s an unusually challenging meeting at the Wasby Women’s Institute, with local resident and former drug-dealer Adam Fleetwood talking about his crimes and subsequent rehabilitation…but events take a gruesome turn when prospective member Grace Thoresby is discovered murdered in the kitchen.
The case is particularly unwelcome for investigating officer DCI Jude Satterthwaite. Adam was once his close friend and now holds a bitter grudge, blaming Jude for landing him in jail in the first place. To complicate things further, the only thing keeping Adam from arrest is the testimony of Jude’s former girlfriend, Becca Reid, for whom he still cares deeply.
As Jude and his colleague and current partner, Ashleigh O’Halloran, try to pick apart the complicated tapestry of Grace’s life, they uncover a web of fantasy, bitterness and deceit. Adam is deeply implicated, but is he guilty or is someone determined to frame him for Grace’s murder? And as they close in on the truth, Jude falls foul of Adam’s desire for revenge, with near-fatal consequences…
Jo Allen was born in Wolverhampton and is a graduate of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and the Open University, with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and Earth science. She’s been writing for pleasure and publication for as long as she can remember. After a career in economic consultancy she took up writing and was first published under the name Jennifer Young, in genres of short stories, romance and romantic suspense. She wrote online articles on travel and on her favourite academic subject, Earth science. In 2017 she took the plunge and began writing the genre she most likes to read — crime.
Jo lives in the English Lakes, where the DCI Satterthwaite series is set. In common with all her favourite characters, she loves football (she’s a season ticket holder with her beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers) and cats.
