I very much enjoyed this book. I had a hesitation about reading it due to so many reviewers concerns about the two different timelines and the amount of characters in the book. I think the timeline flows beautifully and yes, there are a lot of characters, but I just write their names down! I find in a number of books that I read that there are a lot of characters. I write down the character names for all of Anne Cleeves books because there are so many. So if you like mysteries and procedural type books, I think this is a book you would enjoy to read.