Wesley Peterson is investigating a series of shootings but cannot see any link between the victims. Is another death previously dismissed as an accident related? Meanwhile Neil Watson is excavating what may be an anchoress's cell in an abandoned village.

Slight variation on the usual format with lots of twists at the end. Great fun. ( )

One indication of how much I enjoy Kate Ellis's Wesley Peterson series is the fact that I stay caught up with it. Now that I've read and enjoyed The Stone Chamber, I'm ready for the next book to be released. This is a book-- and a series-- to be savored for its criminal investigations, for the history it uncovers, and for the ever-evolving lives of its characters.

In The Stone Chamber, we learn about anchoresses, devout women who willingly sealed themselves for life into a room attached to a church, although archaeologist Neil Watson and his team learn during their excavation that-- even in the fifteenth century-- there were exceptions to the rule. Readers also learn about the running of asylums in the 1950s, and this was a subject of particular interest to me since a close family member endured some of the same "advanced" treatment during her brief stay in a sanitarium. (Sounds better than asylum, doesn't it?)

I really enjoyed how there was more going on than what met the eye in both stories, while at the same time I worried about Wesley's sick child and wondered if his sergeant was ever going to give birth to her own child. Character-driven readers like me will enjoy this series precisely because there is an excellent cast to concern themselves with.

There were only two slight "head shakers" in The Stone Chamber. One, for the first half of the book, the author mentioned the characters' weight. A lot. (It had to be a lot for it to begin to annoy me.) And two, learning that "...the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act allowed unmarried mothers to be categorized as 'moral imbeciles' and confined in asylums." (I'll see them a moral imbecile and raise them a dozen pompous ignoramuses.)

If you love a book (and an entire series) with an excellent cast, first-rate mysteries to solve, and fascinating tidbits of history to learn, you can't do better than Kate Ellis's Wesley Peterson series. Although it's probably best to begin with the first book in the series, The Merchant's House, it shouldn't be any problem at all to jump in here with The Stone Chamber. You can always go back and read the others once you're hooked. ( )

Curses! The last chance, for the moment, to out fox Kate Ellis and I failed,

The last few books in this series have encompassed a new technique: one part of the crime is flagged in such a way that the reader thinks that they are ahead of the game; the second is a complete googly - not a chance of picking it up but, all there in the text so, what excuse has the reader for not beating the erudite Detective Peterson to the denouement?

BRILLIANT! Please hurry up and publish the next one. ( )