Murder mystery but did I like it really?

A Share in Death
by Deborah Crombie

There's a serious problem in starting a series of detective fiction by reading the oldest book first. It seems a no-brainer--read the first one first. If you hate it then stop; if you love it continue and you'll be glad to have read them in order. But...what if it's neither love nor hate, but somewhere less than the midpoint?

On Goodreads, the first book in this series got a 3.79 star rating but then they gradually climbed up into a consistent 4 star--and even one 4.19. Is this because she improved or because the people who didn't care for that style of book simply stopped reading and rating it?

I suspect it's because she improved--authors tend to do that, you now. But do I want to continue reading at #2 (3.95) or jump to one of the later books and make sure I love them before I spend months on the series?

I wish I'd started in the middle. But if you're thinking about starting these, make sure you're okay with a complicated timeline and a large suspect pool who are a little hard to tell apart from each other. Make sure you can tolerate being inside multiple people's heads (although, thankfully, not at the same time). And be prepared for a frightfully lucky coincidence at the end. Sounds awfully critical of me, doesn't it?  But there's so much potential here--I want to like this--I'll have to try again.