"When You Wish Upon A Star," by Colin Cotterill, in Sunshine Noir, edited by Annamaria Alfieri and Michael Stanley, White Sun Books, 2016.This book ends on a high note with its third appearance in this column.
Our protagonist is a former crime reporter, now reduced to covering social events for the local weekly in the area she moved to for family reasons. When a well-off woman dies in a bizarre car accident - crashing off an unfinished bridge over a river - the reporter suspects that the death was no accident.
Nice setting but what really made it for me was the motive, which is an utterly modern get-rich scheme I have never seen in crime fiction before.
