Bleeding Heart Yard: A Novel

I love this book. this is one of her best. I have read all of the Ruth Galloway series. These books with Harbinder are completely different and more complex. I did not guess the killer, so that is a good thing. There's not a whole lot of melodrama, which I appreciate. I hate when authors write characters that go on and on and on. I finished this in 2 days!

Interesting take on policing in the UK. Well written, as are all of Elly Griffith’s books, but it differs considerably from many police procedurals set in the UK. The nominal main character is a gay Sikh female DI with a new post in London, which certainly sets the book apart from the norm. She also has a superintendent that she apparently respects and who does not breathe down her neck at every moment. I found Harbinder to be intelligent and honest but challenging as a likable character. She appeared to have no sense of humor and no hobbies or interests outside the police force. It was hard to get to know her as a person. Her opinions of her family and friends back home seemed rather disparaging. Her police team and suspects (multiple) offered a bit of intrigue and fleshed out the story well. All in all a good read but I am uncertain whether I would want more of Harbinder Kaur in future books.

I didn't want this story to end. This installment of the series is my favorite. It was easy to become involved in the lives of the various characters and form attachments to some of them.

Harbinder Kaur has now become a DI and has transferred to the serious crimes division of the London CID, leaving her family back home in West Sussex. Her very first case is extremely high–profile: the death of a prominent conservative MP, who apparently took a drug overdose at a high school reunion where his former classmates included another MP (this one Labour), a major actress and a pop star. Also in this group was Cassie, now a police officer who cannot work with Harbinder on the case because she is too close to all of the suspects, not to mention being a suspect herself. It is up to Harbinder and her new team to unravel the links between the schoolmates, and their connection to a death of another student that had occurred 21 years ago…. I love Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway series, but her Hardiner Kaur books are a close second: a gay Sikh woman in the English police force is probably still quite uncommon in real life, but Ms. Griffiths lets her readers get into (and under) the skin of the character and shows us just how British this multicultural country is. I never guessed the killer until that person was revealed at the end of the story, which I think is a plus in murder mysteries, and I also very much enjoyed watching Harbinder grow into her job and into a new relationship. Highly recommended, but read the first two books before starting this third in the series!

Although Elly Griffiths has a fairly large backlist, this is the first of her books I’ve read but now I’m definitely a fan! Bleeding Heart Yard is fast-paced and packed with secrets, lies, and murders. The character list is fairly large but easy to keep track of because the author does a wonderful job giving each individual a distinct personality. The story is told from multiple points of view, which I love because it provides a more complete view of unfolding events.I really love Harbinder Kaur, the new DI assigned to the case. She is completely relatable and quite good at her job! Through hard work and quick-thinking, she proves to her team that she is well qualified for the task at hand.Overall, this book kept me on my toes. It’s a well written procedural with likable characters, plenty of action, and an ending I never saw coming. Definitely add this one to your Christmas list!I received An advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.

I couldn’t decide whether to call this primarily a police procedural or a thriller. Although the title doesn’t mention this, this book is the third in Griffiths’ Harbinder Kaur series. In this third book, Kaur has received a promotion from her previous posting in West Sussex to London and is just settling in as a Detective Inspector among a group of strangers and sharing a flat with two other women, when a murder is committed at a high school reunion. Five friends of the victim, who had formed a kind of “in group” in their high school days, are implicated although another murder follows and then there are four. It’s up to Kaur to figure out who the murderer is and quickly. Not only is she a new DI, needing to prove herself to her team, the victim is an English MP.What made me hesitate about the book being a police procedural is that the book isn’t told completely from Kaur’s point of view. In fact, Kaur shares equal page space with two other characters. Chapters alternate between Kaur and two suspects in the murder, fellow classmates of the victim, Cassie, who is herself a police officer—and on Kaur’s new team—and Anna, who has recently come over from where she now lives in Italy to care for her dying mother. Both Cassie and Anna are haunted by an event that happened 21 years previously, when another young male fellow student died falling off a Tube platform. Early in the book the reader is told the story of the event from Cassie’s perspective but, as another person dies, and both victims claim to have recently discovered “the truth” about what happened on that Tube platform, the reader is encouraged to wonder just who of the remaining four is killing and are they going to stop.We have the usual police interviews, the piecing together of evidence, but I felt that the characters of Cassie and Anna came through more strongly in this book than Kaur. It’s not a new theme, that of murders in the past, secrets covered up by friends, but Griffiths did a good job. I like the way she writes and I especially like the way she puts in snippets of literature and modern culture—quote from The Godfather here, lines from Shakespeare, from Housman, slid in so they are not obtrusive but they, at least to me, show the mark of a writer who is also a reader.Still, overall the book isn’t a “wow” book for me. True that the ending has quite a twist but in a way I feel the twist was unfair. I can’t see how the original murder—that of the student on the Tube platform—was done in the way that the ending says it was done. It’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination. And that takes away a bit from the entire book which, up to that point, was, as I said, well written. So I gave the book 3 stars—well written but the ending was just too much of a stretch for me. If you like Elly Griffiths—I confess I am lukewarm about her, especially her Ruth Galloway series which most people appear to love—I think you’ll like this one.

A wonderful story, Taking on different characters and their approach to the story. Excellent A new approach showing how talented she is,!

Fantastic read……loved the individual chapters on characters… you really got to know them and their life …………fantastic twist at the end . Didn’t see that coming !

A very enjoyable and arresting (no pun) story. With plenty of twists and turns. I am enjoying this series of books.

Aussi bien que ses romans du Norfolk.

Non amo particolarmente i romanzi in cui la storia è portata avanti dalla prospettiva dei diversi personaggi, ma in questo romanzo, ben congegnato e scorrevole, ciò non crea confusione e non disturba né rallenta lo sviluppo della trama. Serie appena iniziata, ma decisa Imente promossa, insieme alla sua protagonista. I