Caro Hooper, one of the three actresses who have gained fame playing the fictional detective Dahlia Lively, has turned her hand to writing – namely writing up their first investigation under the title of The Three Dahlias. How meta… Anyway, she has been invited to a crime writing festival along with her two friends, Rosalind and Posy, but it seems that there is more to do than plug her book.

Five years ago, Dahlia Lively fan Scott Baker was arrested for a murder that mirrored one from one of the books, with Caro providing damning evidence of his guilt. But a true crime podcast team, also at the festival, are determined to prove his innocence. But they are going to need the help of the Three Dahlias to do it…

So, book three in this series, and I’m a tad torn. I’ve got access to an e-copy of the fifth book in the series, out soon, and after really liking the first book, the plan was to get through the books one a month. But then I wasn’t as impressed by the second book. As for the third, well this was going to be the decider as to whether I was going to carry on. And I’m not sure.

I do like the characters, but I do feel as if the sudden leap from reluctant thrown-together sleuths to bestest-friends-in-the-whole-world between the first two books skipped out a fair bit of development – it’s like there’s a bit of their story missing. There’s another jump in their development here, too, as all of a sudden, everyone seems to know the Three Dahlias as a first-rate mystery solving team (including themselves). They’ve solved two cases. That’s all. Doesn’t seem enough to earn their reputation. And also isn’t Posy supposed to be a film star? Doesn’t she have, well, other films to make?

Right, niggles aside, I do like the characters, but it takes a while for the mystery to develop here. The first half, where all we are doing is looking at the cold case, is slow – to be fair, most cold case mysteries are – and you’re just waiting for the inevitable modern day death to spark things off.

It does pick up once that happens and I think this is a better mystery than the first three books, but I had switched off before then. Do I look at book four next month?

I don’t know. I see a lot of potential in this series, but it never quite reached it yet. Let’s see – the series clearly has a lot of fans. The next one is a murder at a snowed-in house, the ideal (if a tad cliched) set-up, so let’s give it a go…