Finished: The Last Party (Mackintosh) A very good whoddunit! Luxury condos for the wealthy have been built on the shores of remote Lake Mirror....on the exact border of Wales and England. The wealthy man responsible for the building is Rhys Lloyd, a local Welsh "boy" who left his hometown village and made it as a famous opera singer. Using the land inherited from his family, Lloyd comes back to Lake Mirror with his wife and teenage twin daughters after his career begins to wane. His land, in the years before, had been settled to be officially in England...so he's one of the wealthy people who comes to build and live at the upper, upper crust neighborhood, The Shore. The town members of Cwm Coed, who live and work and raise children across the lake in Wales, are not happy. Not only is the view of the landscape drastically changed, but the difference between the wealthy "summer home" owners and townspeople, who barely make ends meet, is tremendous. When the first handful of lake front homes is complete, the wealthy owners start moving in. We meet all kinds of interesting characters, both home owners and townsfolk. Rhys Lloyd and his wife, Yasmine, throw a New Year's Eve party and, along side their wealthy neighbors, the entire town is invited to come. By the end of the night, Lloyd is dead! His body washes up on shore at the annual New Year's Day dip in the lake. The Detective Constable in charge on the Welsh side is Ffion Morgan, a thirty year old divorcee who lives with her mother Cwm Coed. She's outdoorsy, very truthful and holds a painful past close. The Detective Constable on the English side is Leo Brady, also a divorcee and father of a young son, who has just relocated from London to the area. DC Brady has problems of his own, as his ex-wife is holding a secret over his head to keep him from seeing his son as the custody arrangement states. He's more the meek type and is surprised by the outspokenness of DC Morgan when he meets  her. Neither one is happy being saddled with the other as a partner, but they must work together to figure out what happened. It gets particularly dicey when Leo begins to discover that Ffion has secrets that may be directly involved with the evening in question...and she has lied to him about it. You can't help but like both characters and root for them to at least become friends and lean on each other. Eventually Ffion's secret, and how it relates to Rhys Lloyd, does come to light just in time to throw them together into another tricky situation. All The Shore neighbors are suspects, as well as many of the townspeople, even  Ffion with her motive. The story does a good job of weaving together all the characters and their stories and why, as it turns out, nearly each and every person who knew him despised Lloyd, and with good reason. I was hoping by the end of the book that Ffion and Leo might work together again on another case, and was just happy to read that this is apparently book #1 of the DC Morgan series! Can't wait for more. :-)