As a new discovery, this is a carry-over from 2018, when Ellis’s Their Lost Daughters completely knocked me sideways during Halloween Bingo. I’ve since read her entire Jackman & Evans series — my favorite entries still being Their Lost Daughters as well as, coming very close, book 4 of the series, The Guilty Ones — and I have continued my adventures in Ellis’s Fenlands world of detection with an encounter with DCI Matt Ballard in Beware the Past, the conclusion of which managed to knock me sideways yet again (though warning: this is definitely not a tale for the faint of heart). And the good news is that the second book of the Matt Ballard series (Five Bloody Hearts) is already available as well, so I’m not done with the Fenlands by a long shot …
Lioness at Large 
I remember your review from HB. I’d read the first book of the Nicki Galena series and not thought much of it. I’ve now bought the first two books of this series and I’m hoping to use them for my HB squares this year. I’m thinking of choosing Joy Ellis for my prefered author care or whatever it’s called.
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After you didn’t much care for the first Nikki Galena book (and I’m guessing I wouldn’t, either), that’s courageous! 🙂 Though I do hope you’ll find Ellis’s more recent books more to your liking, so hopefully they will fulfill the purpose of that particular spell card, to be thrown in at a pinch if you don’t care for your original choice (or can’t find anything else to read for the square).
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I’m assuming that Nicki Galena was her journeyman work. It wasn’t awful but I didn’t shine. I don’t think she’d found her own voice then.
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I haven’t read it (yet), but that’s kind of the impression I’m getting as well. She’d definitely found her voice by the time she got around to “Their Lost Daughters”, which was my introduction to her …
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