Cold Smoked

Jane da Silva is back to singing in hotel bars, just scraping by while she looks for a new case to investigate. While singing at a social gathering of international fish marketers, she notes a tartily dressed couple of women whom she assumes are hookers. But when one of those women is subsequently found dead in a hotel room, she realizes that she has found her new case - one that will take her to Norway, to the Shetland Islands, and back home to Seattle where it all began…. This is the last Jane da Silva book and, to my mind, the least of them too. Jane is almost the only character in it from the previous books - no lovely Samoan bodyguard, no lawyer Calvin Mason; the apple orchard/singer Jack from the previous book is peripherally show more noted, but barely seen at all. In addition, the secondary characters are more or less stereotypes - the phlegmatic Swiss investigator, the proudly independent Shetlander (don’t call him Scots!) and so on. Even the whole concept of the series, that Jane is to find “hopeless” cases to solve in order to receive a large inheritance from her late uncle, is given short shrift here, as if the author herself was bored with the whole thing. For completists only, sadly. show less

Under the terms of eccentric Uncle Harold's will, Jane da Silva can only access her trust fund if she investigates "hopeless cases" for the Bureau for Righting Wrongs. Low on cash and waiting for a hopeless case, Jane is singing the blues in a Seattle hotel lounge during a seafood convention. When a young woman is shot to death, Jane agrees to help the woman's family find the murderer.