Customer Reviews

Say It With Poison

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fun murder mystery; like many others, not altogether believable in the real world, but entirely cohesive in its own. The heroine, Merry Mitchell, has a true past we learn about and learn to care about. The characters are not, for the most part, caricatures or stereotypical but drawn from life, believable. Definitely a possibility as the first novel of a series; whether Granger can continue the writing of believable characters we care about ~ especially Mitchell and Alan Markby, the police representative ~ remains to be seen. I hope so.

This may be the first in this wonderfully entertaining series, but it remains one of the very best.

The characters immediately strike you as real and quirky, with great potential. They are interesting and likeable. The writing is good, and the setting of the small village of eccentric people is excellent. The writing tangs with realism, even though this is generally accepted as being a not-very-realistic sub-genre. (Although, in my opinion, it actually is. The category of the village mystery is filled with realism. Lots of different people all living in close proximity to each other and no one else is bound to cause...interesting, things to happen. The potential for crime in a village is just as real in a village as it is a large city. However, while in a city you could have many different murders being investigated at once, in a village, rules of proportion cut the number of murders down to one. (Or thereabouts.) And as such, you can bring across in your novel every single aspect of the society in which this murder has occured, as the society is such a small one.

The plot here is great. The characters realistic. The solution unexpected. And the style typically Agatha Christie's Miss Marple-esque.

Great, great fun.

This first in the Mitchell & Markby series holds quite a bit of promise. It is certainly a modern version of the English village mystery. Ms. Granger writes a book with a tight plot and believable characters. We discover that Meredith Mitchell is a diplomatic worker who has come home to England for the wedding of her god-daughter who is also a cousin. She visits a poky little English village, and discovers that a whole lot of evil is going on behind the scenes. It results in a murder, and Meredith is thrown in with the local Police Inspector. She finds herself helping him with solving the puzzle, much to Markby's chagrin. The play between these two characters is interesting to watch, and I am looking forward to reading more in this series.

Does the author want us to empathize with the heroine,because I found it difficult to do so.I enjoyed the story and thought that Granger evolved a good plot with a good style of writing but the character of Meredith is irritating and unconvincing.She comments on the rudeness of others while being extremely uncivil herself,perhaps this was subtlety and it went over my head but at least the Agatha Raisin character created by Beaton has the excuse of being dragged up in the Birmingham slums,we are expected to believe that Meredith is a diplomat,well,I would not want her fighting my corner in a dispute.She protects her own privacy fiercely yet goes barging unbidden into the lives of others on the pretext of solving a crime,by what authority does she think anyone should answer her questions,particularly as she is so dismissive of nearly everyone;she seems grumpy and snappy like those women who assist Jonathon Creek,in real life,someone would have put her straight.We are told that she has not seen either her cousin or her god-daughter for years,so it is stretching my credulity to expect me to accept that the girl would confide in her almost from the first at their re-union especially as she is aloof,distant and unsympathetic,no woman would seek her confidence,let alone a vulnerable girl.