It starts so well. The decayed body of a woman is found in the woods near Braxham Parva in the English countryside. The village is acutely described, and the main characters are sympathetic. The condition of the body is sensitively but accurately detailed. Everything looks set for a cosy English mystery -- that is, until the local doctor has a private furniture-chewing session on Page 46 and gives the whole game away to the reader.
I pressed on, briefly, hoping that this would all turn out to be some diabolically clever red herring. But no. That's all, folks! So with all the detectival interest instantly leached out of the story, why go any further?
Anyway, there's a heroine. She's French, and a widow. She has two suitors, the gruff Irish teacher Mike Brennan and the aforementioned homicidal doctor. Guess which one wins? Oh, and she has a hysterically bedridden son who communes with the dead woman's ghost. Like many ghosts, this one has great difficulty getting to the point, preferring instead to give interminable suggestive hints: whereas if it had simply told him straight off: 'The doctor killed me and buried me THERE', then everyone would have got their just deserts ever so much sooner.
Perhaps this is what's meant by Transcending the Genre -- i.e. spoiling a promising detective story with a chaste romance and a dash of the occult. My vague positive memories of an earlier book called Dewey Death persuaded me to give this one a try, but I won't be going back.
Why on earth is it a Crime Club Selection? And while we're on the subject, why does the cover show a fleshy young brunette, when the corpse is described several times in the book as the skeleton of a middle-aged blonde?
One for the charity bin. No pun intended.
Jon.
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