Written in Red

By: Annie Dalton

Narrated by: Karen Cass

Shortly before Christmas, Professor James Lowell is found brutally attacked in his rooms at Walsingham College, where Anna Hopkins works as an administrator. Baffled as to why anyone would wish to harm such a gentle, scholarly man, Anna discovers that Lowell had a connection with her fellow dogwalker Isadora Salzman, who knew him as an undergraduate in the 1960s, a comember of the so-called Oxford Six.

It turns out that Isadora has been keeping a surprising secret all these years. But someone else knows about Isadora's secret: someone who has sent her a threatening, frightening letter. Could the attack on Professor Lowell have its roots in a 50-year-old murder? And who is targeting Isadora and the surviving members of the Oxford Six?

©2016 Annie Dalton and Maria Dalton (P)2017 Soundings

Complex and charming

A multiple-murder mystery would not normally be conceivably charming, but Dalton has created such credible canine and human characters that her complex Christmas tale is painfully truer to life than escapist. Yet, using the Christmas trappings to great effect, this story of tragic nostalgia and the perils of looking back rather than around oneself, living in the hopeful moment like a dog, thrums through every page. The rhythms of Anna’s transformed life with the twice-rescued white shepherd are becoming as healing and familiar to the reader as to the protagonists, and the awkward glitches of the first book have been left far behind. I never generally read Christmas books after New Year’s Day, so the fact that I not only read but loved this book in February, when I am normally searching for something about early spring, speaks volumes about how satisfying a book-and series-it is.