AWAKENING

There is love, murder and snakes in the grass in a picturesque English village.

Clara Benning is a young veterinary surgeon whose patients these days run to animals considerably less exotic than cobras. But she’s logged a good bit of time in the herpetology precincts of world-class zoos. Clara knows which snakes are placid, which are poisonous and which are found in Dorsetshire only in the company of person or persons unknown. Consider the Australian taipan, aka “the Devil from Down Under.” It’s big, powerful, easily annoyed and routinely lethal. Clara can’t explain how a taipan came to Dorset. Nor can hunky Assistant Chief Constable Matt Hoare, who’s confronted with a community in rising panic. What’s clear, however, is that someone pretty smart about snakes is employing them as deadly weapons. Evil is slithering through Dorset, and plucky Clara won’t rest until she scotches it.

Bolton (Sacrifice, 2008) overplots on occasion, but her heroine, so troubled and so valiant, is irresistible.