I’m super pleased to welcome you all on my blog today for my stop on the blog tour for Dying Art by Malcolm Hollingdrake. Many thanks to Sarah at Bloodhound Books for the opportunity! Also make sure you visit my lovely chum Kate at The Quiet Knitter for her post on the tour!
Author : Malcolm Hollingdrake
Title : Dying Art
Series : DCI Bennett
Pages : 255
Publisher : Bloodhound Books
Publication date : July 17, 2017
Following his recovery from a personal and professional trauma, Detective Chief Inspector Cyril Bennett has been declared medically fit to resume his police duties. He returns to discover a complex case involving the art world.
Soon Bennett unearths a dark side of the industry where greed, ambition and dubious practices thrive and, where there is money to be made, violence and murder are never far away. Working their way through a maze of galleries, museums and the internet, Bennett’s team struggles to make sense of the evidence.
Can Bennett tell the difference between what is real and what is fake?
Dying Art is the fifth book in the DCI Bennett series and by now it definitely feels like catching up with old friends.
Cyril Bennett is still recovering from traumatic events in the previous book and trying to deal with the guilt he feels in not having been able to stop a tragedy. In case it wasn’t clear from that sentence, I think you should really read the other books in the series as you’d miss out on quite a bit of background if you treat this one as a standalone.
As I’ve come to expect from Malcolm Hollingdrake, the case that Bennett’s team is investigating is another intricate one where various people are connected and you hurt your head trying to figure out who, what, where and why. This case touches upon one of Cyril Bennett’s passions, namely art and paintings. But the art world is a more dangerous world than you can possibly imagine. With a lot of money changing hands, it’s sure to attract the wrong sort of people who have no qualms whatsoever to trade in fakes and who will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their shady business safe.
With Bennett unavailable for part of the storyline, it’s Owen who moves more to the forefront again which I thoroughly enjoyed as he fast became a firm favourite of mine throughout the series. Luckily Bennett wasn’t too absent as the books are just not the same without the inside jokes and their banter.
Malcolm Hollingdrake delivers another fantastic addition to this incredibly enjoyable series and I very much luck forward to the next book!
Many thanks to Sarah Hardy and Bloodhound Books for my advanced copy and for the opportunity to join the blog tour!
Dying Art was published on July 17th.
Amazon US – Amazon UK – Goodreads
You could say that the writing was clearly written on the wall for anyone born in a library that they might aspire to be an author but to get to that point Malcolm Hollingdrake has travelled a circuitous route.
Malcolm worked in education for many years, even teaching for a period in Cairo before he started writing, a challenge he had longed to tackle for more years than he cares to remember.
Malcolm has written a number of successful short stories and has four books now available. Presently he is concentrating on a series of crime novels set in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
Born in Bradford and spending three years in Ripon, Malcolm has never lost his love for his home county, a passion that is reflected in the settings for all three novels.
Malcolm has enjoyed many hobbies including collecting works by Northern artists; the art auctions offer a degree of excitement when both buying and certainly when selling. It’s a hobby he has bestowed on DCI Cyril Bennett, the main character in his latest novel.
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Novel Deelights 
😘 fab review tour twin xx
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