‘Forget-Me-Not Blues’ by Alison Gray

Published by Alison Gray, 2017. 

ISBN: 978-1-91200358-7

Abby Foulkes is a police detective sergeant in England who has experienced the loss of her husband and is still grieving.  She is not allowed to return to work until she completes a programme of counselling.  She had been involved in a case on the Greek island of Skiathos in the previous year when she had worked with Lieutenant Angelo Christofis.

Gradually Abby becomes interested again in the bone circle murders she had investigated in the Aegean.  She looks at photos from the past remembering a boy who had disappeared whom she had met in 1998.   She decides to visit Greece again, having refreshed her memories of a series of discoveries of bones laid out in circles on various Greek islands from 1990 and 2010.   She has no official status and, in fact, decides to travel under a false name to a commune on Skiathos which may be connected to some of the victims.

Soon after her arrival she and another woman at the commune find a dead body on the beach - this is a far more recent demise of a refugee.   She talks to the Greeks who run the commune offering exercise classes, painting classes and even some counselling.   Other bones are found and Abby eventually discerns a vague picture of the deaths.  She puts herself in danger by so doing.  The climax is dramatic and deadly.  Most of the book is set in Greece and a picture of modern and old Greece is built up.

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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

This is the third adventure for Abby.

Alison Gray was born and grew up in Scotland. She now lives in the north-east of England and has lived there since the 1980s. Her first novel Out of the Tower was shortlisted for the Constable Trophy 1992, a competition for the best unpublished novel by a writer from the north of England. It was described by the judges as powerful, strong, heartfelt, admirably tense, a work of great promise and individuality, carefully thought out and with subtlety, deftness and poetic nature of idiom.   The Abby Foulkes mysteries are set in Newcastle upon Tyne and the Aegean. The second mystery Lady's Slipper won Indie Book of the Day Award in November 2015 and the third mystery Forget-me-not Blues was picked as an Official Selection in the Mystery Category of the 2017 New Apple Summer E-Book Awards.

                                                                       

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.