The following review was written by Book Review Editor Bobbi King:
Blood-Tied: The First Esme Quentin Mystery
By Wendy Percival. Ebook. 2021.
We got lots of work done during those quarantine days, right? What luck! We were mandated to stay home. No need for making excuses for not joining friends and not going out for lunch. We stayed home without guilt and spent whole afternoons reaching out to new DNA matches. We got caught up reviewing those persistent fluttering hints, and we finally polished off that nagging stack of family group sheets brought home from the family reunion. Congratulations, work well done.
Now it’s time to escape the summer heat and dip into some easier and more enjoyable reading.
Blood-Tied is the first of four fiction novels with Esme Quentin as the central character. She bears an unknown past that gradually unravels, and she pursues genealogy. She lives in an English cottage in an English village in the Shropshire hills, widowed, when she receives a frantic phone call that summons her to the bedside of her comatose sister, brutalized by an unknown attacker. Esme and her niece Gemma set out to discover what happened, and along the way Esme must reckon with discomfiting family secrets.
The book is a pleasurable read and an entertaining escape into someone else’s genealogy. It offers some leisure breaks from our own work, or time out from the heat, or some relaxation time sitting outside after a long day’s drive in the RV.
The book is available at the author’s website, where you may add to your enjoyment by downloading a free prequel to the Esme Quentin series, Legacy of Guilt. The author has three other stories and two novellas available for download.
Blood-Tied: The First Esme Quentin Mystery is available from the author at https://www.wendypercival.co.uk/ as well as from Amazon in paperback at https://amzn.to/3gEmFzd and in a Kindle edition at: https://amzn.to/3gFDb1P.