Last year, I went on a bit of Finder bender, reading the first six volumes in the course of a couple weeks. Sadly, that was all our local library had, and our local comic shop only had collections I’d already read, so I stopped there. Last time I went to the comic shop, I idly checked to see if they’d ordered any more collections, and was very excited to see they had gotten in both The Rescuers and Five Crazy Women (which I held off on until next visit). If I have a complaint with Finder, it’s that I read them too quickly. It’s not that they’re insufficiently dense (the quantity of background details in any given issue is impressive), but I can’t really stop reading a collection until I’m done with it.
This storyline is loosely based on the Lindbergh kidnapping, but it’s less interested in the whodunit aspects (which is interesting, since the whole setting is reminiscent of a proper English country manor mystery). Jaeger, unexpectedly, already knows who the kidnapper was, so the plot is pretty much superfluous, so it’s really just a background piece for further looks into Ascian society, as well as the life of one of the minor clans. Talisman remains the high point of the series, but this is still pretty great.
Utterly unrelated to the discussion, but I did notice that McNeil’s backgrounds switched from meticulously cross-hatched to smudgy and charcoal-y for a couple installments. I hadn’t noticed such a change in previous volumes, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.