It’s an ill wind by Nina Lambert ran over five episodes in Woman’s Weekly. I saved them up and read the whole as I would have done a novel.
The story is cozy crime with romance. The crime is all off-stage, if you don’t count a cack-handed effort by one of the romantic couples to pretend they’re villains and the romance is fairly well-concealed too. Our heroine Emma, kicks over her job in the opening paras and that turns out to be because she’s secretly in love with her boss, Liam. Liam reappears at the end of episode three.
As almost everyone is a chef and the action takes place on a luxury yacht, there are a lot of recipes containing chilli and coconut and prawns. The chief villain beats his wife (3rd) and drinks too much.
Okay, it didn’t float my dinghy. Magazine serials used to be the meaty fiction offering wrapping up the week’s reading. Now, the editors seem to believe all the research about readers having the attention span of one of those unfortunate prawns in Emma’s lunches. The writer has had to reduce everything to synopsis. We are TOLD the whole story. Where are the emotions this reader wants to engage with?
Woman’s Weekly have a new serial starting on 6th February from Jan Jones.
Novels Now 