Helle and Death - Oskar Jensen

I'm in the Scottish Borders at the moment (lovely) where I had planned on doing a fair bit of dog walking whilst I had a dog at my disposal - that worked to both our satisfaction for all the time I had access to him, and also a lot of reading and knitting. I have done a little knitting and next to no reading. Never mind. 

I'm still on a mission to finish up a whole lot of half-started books from the last year, and at least I've done one of them with Oskar Jensen's fiction debut 'Helle and Death' which I hope will be the start of a series. I asked for a review copy of this through work more or less on a whim and sort of forgot about it. When it turned up I wasn't overly excited, but started it over lunch anyway and was instantly hooked. 

Oskar Jensen is an academic currently based at Newcastle but with what sounds like fingers in lots of pies including writing an infuriatingly good murder mystery whilst working on the scholarly stuff. The immediate appeal of Helle and Death (Helle is Dr Torben Helle, a Danish art historian) is that it takes time to be a little bit funny/tongue in cheek, and for the consistent references to Golden age crime - if you know the books they give a couple of clues. 

The set up is a country house party in deepest Northumberland organised by Antony Dodd, the guests are a group who became friends in halls of residence during their first year at Oxford. It's a good ten years since graduation and they've all moved on, but Anthony made a fortune in tech before disappearing and there's an element of curiosity bringing them all back together. 

During dinner on the first night Anthony reveals he's terminally ill, the next morning he's found dead. At first it looks like a suicide, then it looks like it might not be. Unfortunately there's an epic blizzard, nobody is going anywhere, and one of these old friends might be a murderer. So far so good and even if it was just the country house set up with some mildly funny jokes and a lot of references for the Golden age fans it would be more than enough, but the relationships between the characters raises this book to something more.

Jensen does a splendid job of capturing the dynamics between a group of people who shared 3 extraordinary years of privilege before going their separate ways - the people who still like each other, and those who really don't. The tensions between them as they compare careers, the jealousies that haven't quite gone from undergraduate days, along with the new ones, and a whole lot of other old feelings for one another. The 30 something age bracket is smart too - that point where youth is definitely behind you and you really start to wonder where your life is going. It's enough to make me care about the characters which is relatively unusual and why I'm hoping for more.