Women’s Murder Club: A Darker Shade of Grey is the latest game from the James Patterson Women’s Murder Club series. As with the first offering, Death in Scarlet, you’ll be playing three of the characters from the book series: Lindsay, the homicide detective; Claire, the forensic examiner; and Cindy, the newspaper reporter.

A Darker Shade of Grey is a combination of a hidden-objects game and puzzle game as you investigate the deaths of two cadets from the Jackson-Moore military academy. Cutscenes drawn comic book style will move you between sections of the game and forward the storyline.

Although the cutscenes were useful for the character interplay and story progression, I wish there was an option to click through the panels a bit faster. The only option if you click is to cancel the cutscenes entirely.

In this installment of the story, things are quiet, and the ladies are enjoying a lunch out when Lindsay is called to investigate what is probably an accidental death. As she examines the body of the young cadet — in town for a soccer tournament — things just aren’t adding up for it to be an accident. What the girls eventually unearth is far bigger than any of them could have imagined. Because the story is the meatiest part of the game, I will leave it to you to discover it at your own pace.

The graphics for most of the scenes are nicely done. The cutscenes were a little iffier. In one panel, it looks like Lindsay is wearing a scarf, but immediately before and after, she’s not. Sometimes the body positions didn’t look quite right either. It’s just little inconsistencies that bugged me. The music is done well. The background sound effects work with the story. There wasn’t anything jarring or annoying.

There are little tutorial tips available in the game. If you don’t need them, you can easily turn them off. If this is your first time through one of these games, definitely leave them on. Beyond that, you get five hints for each chapter of the game and unused hints roll over to the next chapter. If you get stumped on one of the puzzles, there’s a solve button so you can keep the story moving forward.

The hidden-object puzzles felt much easier this time around. There are a few scenes in which you have to find shreds of paper — either strips or torn pieces. The finding was easy, and then you get to assemble them so you can read the text. With the paper strips, they were in exactly the same place each time I came to that scene. I would have liked to see it be a bit more challenging. There is a scene in which you have to find letters (alphabet letters) and another in which you find coffee cups to fill. There wasn’t anything that was a truly intricate search for hidden objects in a picture. I miss that from the previous version.

There are a few different varieties of puzzles in this installment. My complaint is that they were all incredibly easy. The challenge in the lab is to pull labeled chemical bottles off some moving shelves and put the right number of drops in the mix. There’s no time limit and no figuring out which bottle to use. You just wait for it to come by. The most challenging puzzle is that way because of a glitch, in my opinion. In the beginning of the game, you use a marker to complete faded out letters to get a name. I’ve tried it twice now, and each time there is one letter that I cannot complete. I know what it is. I draw and redraw and redraw and it will never complete the one letter. It’s the only place I have to use the Solve button to advance — because the interface will not accept what I’m drawing.

I know some of the puzzles for the first installment were brutally hard. My guess — and I don’t know this for sure — is that they decided to make the puzzles easier since so many people were getting stuck. Unfortunately, I feel they went too far in the easy direction and really removed pretty much all challenge.

A Darker Shade of Greyis definitely laid out to feel like you’re playing through a story to solve a crime. There’s no time limit, so you don’t need to rush through scenes or wildly click away to find something. Even going slowly and taking my time, the entire game only took about three hours.

While I was happy to see a new installment, I was disappointed at how much shorter this game was and how much easier the challenges were. The graphics and sound are still very good, but I would have liked to see a little more meat on the puzzles. The story was interesting, though it didn’t draw me in as much as the first. If you thought the first offering in the series was too hard, this may be more your speed. However, an experienced gamer is going to fly through this one. A retail version will be available in late March.