I burned through 14 books in this series in about two months so you can see they are very quick reads. That doesn’t mean they are too formulaic or superficial. Crombie gets into the characters and plots out a pretty good mystery. Each one also has a bit of English history and interesting location info (though I could do without the quotes at the beginning of each chapter). Her characters are detectives but they have lives. I like that. Kincaid and James do their jobs but still have a family life. Yes, there’s quite a bit of dropping the kids at "child minders" but the kids are starting to have personalities also and are not just McGuffins. Definitely a worth-while series.   posted May 3, 2013 at 12:01PM