Read while traveling in Italy, so no real review possible. Average for the series. ( )

Blood Will Tell is set in Cambridge University. Ms. Dams has provided a note on [unnumbered] page vii that gives a website that will explain the unusual college system at Cambridge and Oxford for readers who need it. She also admits to modifying that system for the college she made up. (I didn't go to the website. If my ignorance on the subject interfered with my understanding of the mystery, I didn't notice.)

If you have an excellent, or even just good, sense of direction, you might find it hard to believe that Dorothy Martin got lost as easily as she did. I'm as graphically challenged as Dorothy and I assure you that it is that easy to get lost even when one has a map.

Dorothy stumbles upon a lab with a considerable puddle of blood on its floor. Thus starts the mystery. Before it's over, Dorothy will narrowly escape death. Her beloved husband, Alan Nesbit, is going to miss quite a bit of the law enforcement symposium he's been invited to attend. Students will go missing. A long-held secret will be [privately] revealed. Dorothy will get a new hat.

Notes:

Chapter 1: Dorothy tells Alan about the only other time she stayed in an English university and how it contrasts with their present accommodations.

Chapter 3:

a. What we Americans call a backpack the English call a rucksack.

b. Superintendent Elaine Barker tells Dorothy about an unusual case involving West Indians that happened when she was a new detective sergeant.

Chapter 3: Dorothy describes her favorite cocktail hat.

Chapter 5: Dorothy can understand a bit of Tom Grenfell's subject because both her father and her first husband were biologists.

Chapter 14: Alan's daughter, Elizabeth, had two pet rats (Gregory and Wilberforce), when she was 10 - 12.

Chapter 14: Dorothy mentions the Stepford Wives (book & movie, there was more than one movie)

Chapter 20: We get Mahala's backstory.

Dog lovers: Watson the spaniel-mix gets only a mention. Jane is caring for him,.

Cat lovers: Prepare to be insulted on Sam the Siamese-British Blue and her half-sister, Emmy the British Blue-tabby's, behalf because Alan refers to them only as 'the cats' when talking about the pets. (Well, Emmy is mentioned by name in ch. 24) ( )

Not so much a nod to the Golden Age of mystery as a full-fledged curtsey to Dorothy L. Sayers, this adventure takes Dorothy Martin and her husband Alan Nesbitt to St. Stephens College at Cambridge University for a conference. Dorothy goes exploring and finds a pool of blood in a laboratory and glimpses someone in a white lab coat leaving through a back door. But when she brings Alan back to show him, the blood is gone. Numerous callouts to Sayers, both overt and subtle. Recommended. ( )

Blood Will Tell is the seventeenth book in the Dorothy Martin Mystery series.

It is always a joy to visit with Dorothy Martin and her husband, Retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt.

In this adventure Dorthy is heading to Cambridge as Alan has been invited to attend a police conference. Dorothy is planning on joining Alan and steps into a building it an attempt to get directions and enters a laboratory. The lab is vacant, but she sees someone in a lab coat leaving and soon discovers a pool of blood on the floor. She has no idea where the blood came from. She soon finds Alan and convinces him that she knows what she saw. When they arrive back at the lab, there is no evidence of blood. The police are called in and Superintendent Barker says there is not much she can do without the evidence that Dorothy claims to have seen. Once a student goes missing and Dorothy is pushed down a flight of stairs at a museum, Barker starts to believe in Dorothy's story.

Barker then enlists her nephew, Thomas Grenfell, who is a student and uses that particular lab, to help in finding out who or what the blood was from. Then when Grenfell goes missing, not only is Barker sure that something sinister has happened, but it has become personal.

This leads Dorothy into the countryside of Cambridge and for the river, searching among the punters looking for, the much valuable clues to solve this mystery.

Dams provides the reader, once again, with an insight to life in England, its beautiful countryside, historic cities and an enjoyable and believable cast of characters. ( )