Fiona Mountain: Pale as the Dead

From the back of the book-

Natasha Blake is a detective with a difference. She's an ancestor detective, an ambitious young genealogist with a passion for history, whose choice of career is partly driven by the mystery of her own roots. Natasha's investigations involve family secrets, forgotten tragedies and buried crimes and her clients are anyone for whom the past affects the present-the haunted, the hopeful or the just plain curious.
Natasha is contacted by Bethany, a troubled young woman who is strangely reticent about her past-and then she disappears. As Natasha investigates, she uncovers a connection between Bethany and Lizzie Siddal, the haunting, ethereal Pre-Raphaelite model and artist, whose life was cut short by an overdose of laudanum. Was it accident or suicide? And why is Bethany so obsessed with her, and at the same time so determined to put herself beyond the reach of her lover, Adam?

This book presented an interesting spin on the usual detective story. It was a little difficult to believe that somebody would go to a geneologist to find a modern day missing person rather than, I don't know, the police or a detective, but once you get over that hurdle the past and present mysteries intertwine, making it impossible to unravel one without solving the other. And I didn't see the final twist coming too far out.
The characters, particularly the main character, had some substance to them, however I had trouble connecting with any of them. At least I didn't care enough to follow up with the next book in the series.
Not that this was a bad book, far from it. It just didn't pull me in.-Lynn