1994 mystery. Sheila Malory is on the committee of the Taviscombe
Festival, which has been turned by incoming luvvies from a pleasant
local event into a big fuss with imported performers. But one of the
most irksome of those incomers turns up with his head bashed in… US vt
Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murders.
Most people despised the victim, but probably not enough to kill
him. He was known for putting it about a bit, so perhaps an outraged
husband or father? But on the other hand he doesn't seem to have
expected to be attacked, and other possible motives soon come to
light.
After the excursion of The Shortest Journey, this is a much more
conventional murder mystery, though none the worse for it. There's a
wide array of suspects, even if Mrs Malory is prone to say something
to the effect of "when I met him and talked to him again, I knew that
he couldn't possibly have done it". And I'm very glad to see that
when Mrs Malory is enumerating the remaining suspects and the state of
play Holt doesn't fall into the error or leaving one of them out of
the list in order to try to surprise the reader later (which, if
you've been keeping track, is instead a huge pointer to First
Murderer). The central section largely consists of chance encounters
with various suspects during daily life, which could feel contrived,
but Holt manages to make it seem like an inevitable consequence of
small town life.
As previously in Gone Away, once it becomes clear that Mrs Malory
knows what's happened and the Ungodly know that she knows, the book
comes to a sudden end rather than have a coda of arrests and
resolutions. I like to see the non-murdery threads of a story like
this tied off, but the sudden ending as the schemes collapse makes
sense on its own terms; these aren't desperate villains who could drop
everything and escape to a life of continued villainy elsewhere; they
did a thing because they felt the thing needed to be done, and one may
indeed not entirely disagree with them.