I picked this up mostly because I liked the cover and there's a bit of buzz about it - it looked like it was going to be a decent easy read at the cosier end of the crime scale. And more or less it is exactly that, but a quote from the mail that says "This has a Netflix series written all over it..." probably more or less sums it up. There's lots of great visuals in here and an intriguing plot, it would televise nicely, but it doesn't quite hang together as a book.
I didn't check until I'd finished reading but Kristen Perrin is American, she moved to England to do a masters and then a PHD after several years as a bookseller. It probably explains a few of the anomalies - the most glaring of which seems to be a lack of understanding of how titles and property are handed down through British aristocracy, or inheritance tax.
I'm not sure who exactly this book is aimed at, cosy crime suggests middle age to me (because I'm middle aged and I don't like violent psychological crime thrillers, but plenty of my contemporaries do so that's worth very little), but the cover maybe suggests a younger more design-conscious, bookstagram, reader. They may not be particularly well-versed in the inequities of primo geniture either for all I know, but I grew up on Jane Austen before moving on to Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.
I suppose there might be a world where a small English Village had two ambulances stationed in it, but not one where paramedics commonly worked alone - who hasn't seen enough Casulty to understand that? And the 60s might have been swinging in London and the bigger cities, but attitudes towards sex outside of marriage for middle-class girls in the counties took a long time to catch up, and so did the availability of condoms. There's a very sketchy understanding of the current art market too.
The premise of How To Solve Your Own Murder is that in 1965 three teenage girls have their fortune read at the village fair, one is told her future contains dry bones and she will be murdered. She takes it to heart, and after another one of the three goes missing she dedicates her life to solving that mystery and evading her own fate. Eventually, more than half a century later she is murdered just as her great-niece has been sent for as a new potential heiress - she might be the right daughter mentioned in the fortune who will bring justice.
Annie is an unemployed would be crime novelist living in a Chelsea mansion with her artist mother on the charity of Great Aunt Frances. She seems a bit flakey, the terms of the will say if she solves her great aunt's murder within a week and before the police or the other potential heir - I don't think this is a will that would stand up in court. Much of the detection work revolves around reading Frances' diaries that Annie has discovered from the summer of 1965, and these flashbacks are probably the best bit of the book, the characters come alive, and the plot holes are less glaring.
This is the first in a planned series, it will probably do well, and there are worse things out there, but it fell flat for me. The resolution to the 1960s murder is flimsy, and half an hour's research would have cleared up some silly errors - that nobody thought it worth checking any of these details made me, as a reader, feel taken for granted.
No comments:
Post a Comment