Asking for Trouble

and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had been a big fan of the other series by this author and was disappointed not to encounter my favorite duo of detectives, but I think I may like Fran Varady (the "detective" in this series) even better. She's young, lives on the edge, has guts and intelligence, and doesn't back down. In this story, Fran is living in a "squat" (she's one of a group of illegal tenants in a building scheduled to be torn down -- they just pulled off some boards and moved in, because there's a severe shortage of housing in London and they can't afford housing). The local housing council is on the verge of evicting them when one of the squatters is found dead -- it's made to look like an accident, but clearly there's signs of a struggle. The police suspect that the killer is one of the other squatters (for no good reason, except these people don't have the power to avoid getting railroaded, or so the police think, I guess). Fran manages to finally convince them that none of them did it, but she sets out to find the killer. She didn't particularly like the victim, but no-one deserved what she got. She ends up going to the victim's family home in the country, where she is truly a duck out of water. I highly recommend this book. Perhaps the reading of the book was particularly well done, and that's why I liked it, but I'm going to read more in the series.

I've become a fan of Ann Granger's Fran Varady series of novels. I particularly enjoy listening to Kim Hicks reading them. Fran's a young woman who's struggling against homelessness, alone in the world with no family. She's a survivor, though, with a wry sense of humor and a prickly independence. This isn't the best of the books, but worth your listening time if you want to take a little mental trip to London - not the tourist's London but the London of people like Fran. I recommend it.