The cleverness seemed forced and the story progressed slowly. ( )

Another clever British mystery from Catherine Aird. "Harm's Way" is part of her continuing series starring CID Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan who plies his trade in the English countryside. This case begins with the discovery of a human finger--dropped by a crow. Now DI Sloan must ferret out the clues to discover: where's the body; who's the body; and how it came to be missing a finger. With his less-than-helpful aide, Detective Constable Crosby, CD weeds through a cast of missing persons and motives galore only to find the crime is for one of the oldest, and most common, reasons.

Aird writes tight and entertaining mysteries with all the droll humor expected from an English author. I do warn readers, though, that if they aren't familiar with the 'Queen's English', British mannerisms, and British culture...you may not enjoy "Harm's Way" and CD as much as I do. ( )

Read three of these in a row. Like most Catherine Airds, good but I can't distinguish one from the next. They're all C.D. Sloane stories, and I can very rarely remember which title goes with which story. But they're always worth reading and re-reading - I just got these three but none of them are new to me, I enjoyed reading them and will keep them for future rereadings. English small-town police procedurals; she has some repeated themes (the Superintendent is a pointy-haired boss; the constable Sloane always gets stuck with is a speed demon with no brain; "Happy Harry of the Traffic Division - he had that name because he had never been known to smile. Harry always insisted that there was nothing in the Traffic Division's work worth a smile..." - that line, almost verbatim, is in every single book. But the mysteries are nicely varied, and oddly enough while the recurring characters are mostly cardboard and cliche, the ones involved in any individual mystery - the non-recurring characters - are nicely rounded and interesting. ( )

Police are called in when a hiker discovers a finger on a country path. After an extensive search, the source of the finger is found. ( )

The finger dropped by a common crow on a woodsy English footpath was most uncommonly missing a body. But a single digit was enough to tell Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan that something was rotten in the county of Calleshire ... something besides the dead man who lay unburied somewhere among the dewy green fields of British farmland. So while search teams scoured the area for the corpus delicti, Sloan went looking for evidence of murder in a county village's most fertile ground - at the local pub. There the slips betwixt cup and lip might provide clues to finding both corpse and killer in Inspector Sloan's most challenging case.