Lesley Cookman, "Murder by the Sea"
Aug. 1st, 2011 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stapsreadsI have read good fiction about illegal workers. (Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans, for example.) I have read gripping thrillers featuring psychic detectives. (See Susan Howatch, anything featuring Fr Jon Darrow.) Sadly, this is neither. Having brought in migrant fruit pickers as a useful plot point, Cookman leaves them dangling, ineffectual hand-wringing from the detectives aside - a move that struck me as rather tasteless. The psychic side of things seemed merely a lazy red-herring-generator, a device allowing the detectives to jump to conclusions and land on miraculously solid ground.
A complex and (mainly) pointless cast of supporting characters served only to complicate things. I appreciate that I've come in mid-series, but, really, one needs a set of genealogical tables to get one's head around this lot, and none of them do anything interesting when one has. (And I'd thought that comedy rural accents went out when Dorothy L. Sayers turned her attention to translation, but apparently not.) To add insult to injury, the last page features a quiz on how well the reader knows Steeple Martin. Not well at all, I must admit, given the tendency of places and people to meld into one amorphous blur.
Thin characterisation all round and a frankly implausible plot (Dan Brown meets Unity Mitford and comes off the worse) make this a read that I hope I'll forget in a hurry.
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10043953
A complex and (mainly) pointless cast of supporting characters served only to complicate things. I appreciate that I've come in mid-series, but, really, one needs a set of genealogical tables to get one's head around this lot, and none of them do anything interesting when one has. (And I'd thought that comedy rural accents went out when Dorothy L. Sayers turned her attention to translation, but apparently not.) To add insult to injury, the last page features a quiz on how well the reader knows Steeple Martin. Not well at all, I must admit, given the tendency of places and people to meld into one amorphous blur.
Thin characterisation all round and a frankly implausible plot (Dan Brown meets Unity Mitford and comes off the worse) make this a read that I hope I'll forget in a hurry.
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10043953
