Customer Reviews

Death of a Cozy Writer (Wheeler Cozy Mystery)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Let us begin this review with a blunt declaration: G.M. Malliet can WRITE. And, more vitally, she can tell a story.

The plot of Death of a Cozy Writer revolves around a wealthy, aging aristocrat's will, a storyline harkening back to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's King Lear. Ms. Malliet's novel's central conceit is a British detective procedural that gently skewers the Cozy mystery sub-genre within an English country house setting. Familiar ground, brilliantly re-traversed. Moreover, Malliet manages to honor the sacred concord between mystery writer and reader by faithfully observing the requisite genre conventions, but in her own quirky, tongue-in-chic style.

The author uses the early chapters to depict the various characters with wit and unusual insight. She then deposits them at the nimbly executed meal en famille, a model of nuanced familial interaction and serial revelation. Once the estimable DCI St. Just and obligatory sidekick are introduced into the mix, the pace quickens and the reader is catapulted into a dizzying vortex of misdirection, surprise, and, echoing Greek tragedies, recognition and reversal. So sure, so authoritative is Malliet's grasp of character, plot, and convention as she propels the intricate plot to conclusion, I felt I had witnessed a display of narrative virtuosity equal to that of any first rate mystery writer's very best work.

Appetite whetted, I avidly await the gifted G.M. Malliet's next literary outing. Perhaps she will even include a "Death of an Amazon Reviewer" book in this promising series. Hmmm, I better hide the cutlery......

G.M. Malliet is a professional journalist and copywriter with degrees from Oxford and

Cambridge Universities. DEATH OF A COPYWRITER is her first mystery and has already garnered the Malice Domestic Grant and the Romance Writers of America 2006 Stiletto Award in the thriller category.

Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is as phony as his title. He has also produced one of the truly great dysfunctional families. He is ensconced in his eighteenth-century Cambridgeshire manor, and has married a woman who was accused of murdering her first husband for his money. He delights in using Violet to torment his grown-up children, all of whom have their own foibles. The result naturally turns to murder, and it is up to Detective Chief Inspector St. Just and his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Fear, from the Cambridgeshire Constabulary to sort out the mess. The servants also have their own secrets to cover up, and the result is a jolly investigation marked by hilarious dialogue and commentary:

"The poor bugger really was dead, and he'd been dead awhile. St. Just thought it was little wonder the man who said he was his brother was in such sad shape. The body in the wine refrigerator or whatever it was called was a mess, the skull thoroughly crushed in. The face, itself, however, was intact: In profile, it retained the aristocratic, pampered visage of what the coroner would undoubtedly describe was a well-nourished, middle-aged man."

Malliet writes this little "cozy" with a sense of humor and an eye towards thoroughly confusing the reader. The connections made by St. Just are nothing short of Sherlock Holmes at his most coherent.

Malliet is not unaware of the perils of alcoholism to the family unit, and she uses this as a vehicle to produce the family secrets that would otherwise emerge as far-fetched. But in Ms. Malliet's able writing, it all makes a sordid type of sense. The result is a page-turner that is both entertaining and exhilarating. A most excellent first mystery!

Shelley Glodowski
Senior Reviewer

#1 St. Just mystery. Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a writer of cozy British mysteries, and he's also an absolute beast. Pompous, phony, and cruel to his family, frequently changing his will in favor of whichever of his children has momentarily pleased him (or displeased him the least), he decides to have some real fun by inviting his four children to his wedding. They are aghast of course, seeing a threat to their inheritances, but they all head toward his manor, figuratively attempting to elbow their way into his favor and hopefully talk him out of this marriage to an obvious gold digger. (It takes one to know one!)

Then Sir Adrian drops the bombshell that his marriage is a done deal, that he and Violet are already man and wife and that his will has (yet again) been changed--but he doesn't say how. Shortly thereafter, Sir Adrian's eldest child Ruthven is brutally murdered, and it's not long before he follows his son to the afterlife. Just about everyone has motive to kill one or another of them, so who dunnit?

I admit that I was surprised by the ending, but to be honest, I didn't much care by that point. The book started very slowly, and I nearly gave it up since by the time I hit page 100 (1/3 of the way through the book) there had not yet been a murder, nor had we met DCI St. Just, our intrepid hero. There was just too much set-up, and in reflecting back, the set-up didn't really give many clues to the murderer. Once St. Just entered the scene, things did improve. I like him, and Sgt. Fear too, and wish that his character had been more developed. There is some wry humor that I found amusing, but the overall package of this book was just mediocre to me and it felt like it was "trying too hard." I will likely read the next one, but I've deleted it from my wishlist and just added it to my library list. If St. Just develops further in that book I would say the series has promise.

G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer is a good old-fashioned British drawing room mystery. The ill-fated writer of the book's title is Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk, whose best-selling series of Miss Rampling mysteries has left him rolling in pounds. Sir Adrian's favorite sport is altering his will, disinheriting one or another of his four children in response to real or perceived slights, or for exhibiting questionable taste, among innumerable other possible offenses--torturing them by playing a sort of Russian roulette with their inheritances. Eager to see them all squirm simultaneously and in close quarters, he invites his brood to Waverly Court, Adrian's 18th-century estate in Cambridgeshire, to celebrate his impending nuptials to a woman all four assume will be a British version of Anna Nicole Smith. The invitations prompt the expected amount of shock and complaint. The get-together itself proves to be murderous.

Death of a Cozy Writer is the first in a new series featuring Detective Chief Inspector St. Just of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary and Sergeant Fear. The crime-fighting pair are not introduced, however, until we are some one hundred pages into the book, after a crime has been committed. And when St. Just and Fear do appear we are not told that much about them. Some details emerge: Fear has a daughter; St. Just has a cat aptly named Deerstalker. But while the other characters in the book are described in great detail--the malevolent Sir Adrian and his scheming brood, the help at Waverly Court--the detectives themselves are not fleshed out. This seems odd, as it is St. Just and his right-hand man who will have to anchor the series as its recurring characters, long after the Beauclerk-Fisks have been left on their own to run through their inheritances. It is interesting that the author has elected to breathe life into characters who will (presumably) be replaced in subsequent outings rather than beefing up her portrayal of St. Just.

Malliet's writing is lovely:

"Natasha admired the woman's self-possession. It was an excellent impersonation of aristocracy putting the revolting masses back in their place. Natasha, who had done her own research, found the act nearly pitch-perfect--for an act it was, she was certain. She wouldn't have put it past Lillian to have arrived at breakfast dressed in jodhpurs, cracking a whip against her highly polished boots, despite the absence of a stables for forty miles or more. Instead, Lillian had opted for the simple wool sheath bedecked with a king's ransom in pearls at neck and wrist: the uniform of the bored society matron. But not, Natasha recognized, quite the done thing for breakfast in a country manor house."

And the mystery certainly kept me guessing until all was revealed in the requisite drawing room scene at the book's end. (I am left confused about one issue I should have liked tied up, though, having to do with the identity of Sir Adrian's secretary.) All in all a delightful read. I look forward to more in the St. Just series.

-- Debra Hamel

I read this book for a class on Mystery Books and was extremely disappointed, especially given the glowing reviews on the back cover.
This book was shallow, trite, with caricatures rather than characters. I didn't care who murdered whom because the writer never bothered to evoke any emotion on the part of the reader.
I intend to never again waste my time reading anything by this author.Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery

I loved this book until the end. There are two reasons for my three stars. The first is that the author chose to tell the story by switching point of view every paragraph. This was at times confusing and in general, not a great reading experience. The other reason is that I felt let down at the ending. I didn't feel I was given a fair shot at figuring out the motives. SPOILER ALERT:
I have never liked mysteries where a more peripheral character turns out to be the guilty party and in this book, the ones most involved were the characters who were least drawn out.

The writing is very entertaining in this novel, and it is fun to see how the author plays with the conventions of the genre.

Every character was described acerbically, even a bit nastily, until our hero, DCI St. Just, arrives. He seemed a bit boring by comparison. This first book was fun but I don't have enough interest in St. Just to pick up the other volumes in the series, especially not for 9.99 for the Kindle version.

Having read reviews of this book and listened to people talk about it I must say that I was dubious about reading it. I am a real mystery reading fanatic. I don't want too much messing around with my mysteries. I was worried that this one had been given the "cute" treatment to the extent that I would end up throwing it across the room. Well, so much for that worry because nothing could be farther from the truth.

G. M. Malliet has written a very, very good debut mystery novel. Words like "hilarious", "satirical", and "romp" almost succeeded in turning me completely off but I'm happy to say that I found most of that to be hyperbole evidently intended to snag the attention of non-mystery readers. This story does have it's humorous moments, but they happen very naturally in the narrative and are not used to lampoon the genre. The plot follows the tried and true progression of the type of mysteries classified as "cozy" so if you like those then you will probably like this as well. The author uses characters that have been used before by other writers but they are used here to great advantage because of all the twists and turns in the plot. I don't think this can be described as a completely "fair play" mystery (meaning that every clue is given withing the story and the reader just has to pay attention to gather them up and come to the correct solution), but it was very definitely interesting to watch the author add little bits and pieces along the way to keep the solution under wraps.

In case you aren't familiar with the basic plot, Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk has invited his four adult children to his eighteenth century Cambridgeshire home to have them meet his fiancee. Since the relationship between Dear Old Dad and his children is based on greed on their part and the delights of changing his will for Sir Adrian, can murder be long in arriving? The police team of Detective Chief Inspector Arthur St. Just and Sergeant Garwin Fear were interesting to watch in the performance of their official duties and will probably get more interesting for me as the series progresses.

There is definitely a liberal dose of tongue-in-cheek written into the novel, but this author has also managed to make sure that the mystery itself is engaging, difficult to solve, and worth reading. Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me and I will now order Death and the Lit Chick: A St. Just Mystery expecting to be highly entertained.

Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a famous mystery writer (there are several nods to Agatha Christie here - e.g., Sir Adrian publishes a new novel every Christmas, just like "a Christie for Christmas" was marketed heavily by Christie's publisher for decades). Sir Adrian is possessed of an enormous country house and estate, a vast fortune, and an evil disposition; for years he tormented his children, first in the family household, but now that they're adults and living elsewhere, by changing his will on a monthly basis, always disinheriting someone in rotation.

He calls his children back to the ancestral acres (okay, he is the first generation to own the estate) with the surprise announcement that he is engaged. The children rush to attend, hoping to talk the old goat out of remarrying (and diverting all of his money to his new spouse). Everybody, including the new fiancee and servants, have a motive to kill Sir Adrian.

Surprise! Within hours, someone is killed (I won't spoil it and say who, but it isn't Sir Adrian). Here starts the classic locked-room mystery. Many clues gradually unfold, and additional goings-on occur to deepen the puzzle. Because of the freshly, and undisturbed, fallen snow, the murderer simply could not have come from the outside.

Overall, this is a well-plotted and well-written mystery. If you like the classic, British, locked-room mystery, you will like this book. This author is a real find!

Let's begin with blunt declaration: Ms. Malliet cannot write a jot!

Her characters are feeble and unchanging, her plotlines are contrived, and her "mysteries" hold no mystery. What's worse, her three books are essentially the same story re-told with different characters. How she got published is the only mystery at play here.

Don't waste your money. Buy toilet paper instead.