Customer Reviews

A Cotswold Mystery

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Thea is house sitting and keeping an eye on the elderly lady next door. The elderly lady is her clients mother. Thea has a cute little dog that is a good ice breaker when she first meets the Gladys.
Thea is a little alarmed that she hardly sees the old lady. She is even more anxious when she learns that an alarm is rigged up to her part of the house. It goes off if the front door opens next door. Her clients tell her not to let the old lady out of the house, this worries Thea because she can't see any good reason to keep the old lady practically a prisoner.
Oh, for sure she takes the old lady with her to walk the dog. Turns out Gladys really has a good time walking and talks a lot, until she falls down. Gladys has a memory problem so Thea has to fit together the bits of conversations they have to solve the mystery.
This was a really good story and it moved along a good clip. I listened to the audio version and the reader Caroline Lennon was excellent. I highly recommend this book in either audio or hardcover if your looking for a British cozy mystery.
I don't recollect any hard core bad language or sex scenes so it's a good one if you don't like bad language and x-rated bits thrown in. I was sorry when this book ended and I'm hoping that audible will be getting more books by Rebecca Tope.

If you like your mysteries excessively repetitive and overly long, with flat two dimensional characters and no suspense whatsoever, then this is the writer for you. Her main characters, Thea (mother) and Jessica (police newbie daughter) have a tense sniping relationship which never lets up and, ultimately, I found myself not caring two pins for either of them. Even though we are with these two characters (and a handful of others) for days (felt like years) , we learn little about who they really are as people through their dialogue (inner or outer conversation) and most of our information about ANY character is fed to us by other characters and not by figuring out how we, ourselves, feel about what is being said. This book might have worked better in first person. The writer seems limited by having to stand back, and write a third person multiple viewpoint story. If you're a good writer and can get deep inside the heads of your characters in third person, that's fine, but if you're only skimming the surface of each character, as this writer does, third person multiple viewpoint only deadens and exhausts the reader - as everyone is so flat and boring. There is also no real sense of place or setting in this story despite the importance of the "lost" villages. Thea's wandering through these "lost villages" offers little or no description to give any sort of mood, tension or sense of place to liven up the story. Settings should be full of condensed but very rich description that heightens mood and tension, especially in a mystery. We get none of that here. We could be in any small town anywhere. By page 311 of a long, long 400 page book, I finally gave up and read the last few pages. The ending was not a surprise, of course. If you want to read an intelligent and well written village-set "cosy" mystery with a strong sense of place and well-rounded strong characters, try Hazel Holt's Mrs. Mallory series. A thousand times better.