View source for As Serious As Death (Primavera Blackstone Mystery) by Quintin Jardine

{{infobox1
|title=As Serious As Death (Primavera Blackstone Mystery)
|author=Quintin Jardine
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Crime
|summary=The 5th book in the Primavera Blackstone series makes a for a good, easy read with great characters, location and twisty plot.
|rating=4
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=352
|publisher=Headline
|date=November 2013
|isbn=978-0755357130
|cover=0755357132
|aznuk=0755357132
|aznus=0755357132
}}

Primavera Blackstone is determined to live a quiet life.  She's happy in her role as a single parent to the late Oz Blackstone's three children (one of hers, two of someone else's - don't ask, it's complicated...) and living in a village on the Spanish coast suits her perfectly.  She's OK with Liam Matthews too.  He's not the love of her life but they rub along well together until Liam mentions the M word.  Primavera doesn't want to get married and before long Liam is on his way.  Problems never seem to come on their own - and the next one is the arrival of a retired policeman from her Scottish past.  Ricky Ross is now a private detective and he's working for Jack Weighley, owner of a budget airline and a man whose PR makes him seem nicer than the reality would prove.

He's in Spain to handle some sabotage problems which Weighley wants keeping out of the papers.  Is it nothing more than vandalism, or are Catalan extremists involved?  When a bomb explodes in Ricky's car the Spanish Special Branch seems suspiciously keen to write the matter off as an accident - leaking oil dripping onto an exhaust pipe, you know - but those who witnessed what happened know differently.  It's not long before the body count is rising quickly and despite all her best intentions Primavera is involved.

I'm a fan of Quintin Jardine's [[Funeral Note: A Bob Skinner Mystery by Quintin Jardine|Bob Skinner Mysteries]], not to the point of obsessively reading them all, but glad when one comes my way.  It's a long time though since I read one of the Primavera Blackstone stories.  They've never appealed to the same extent possibly because I find Jardine more convincing when he has a male lead - Primavera always seems to me to be a female man - but the series has been running for a few years now - we're at number five - and I thought I'd better see how it was turning out. (I'll confess too that I lean more towards the police procedural than to the thriller!)

Firstly, if you're looking for a read that pulls you in and keeps you there because you have to find out what happens next then this could be right up your street.  You might have to suspend disbelief about Primavera and the life which seems to have been ''too'' packed with incident and drama - and continues to be - but you wouldn't have picked up the book unless you wanted a good story.  The action starts quickly and it doesn't let up until you turn the final page.  Characterisation is good, there's a real feel for the location and I really hadn't worked out who was behind the deaths until it was laid out on the page in front of me.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag - I'll definitely be looking out for the next in the series.

For more crime in Spain you might like to try [[A Darker Night by P J Brooke]], or for a police procedural you might enjoy [[A Death in Valencia by Jason Webster]].

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