RogerBW's Blog

The Last Word, Elly Griffiths 13 November 2024

2024 mystery, fourth in the loose Harbinder Kaur series. Two sisters ask the detective agency to look into their mother's death, though it was ruled an accident. And it seems that several other writers have also died recently…

Which obviously isn't much of a basis for an investigation, even a freelance one; much of the earlier part of this book falls into what I have come to think of as Griffiths' default pattern, where she finds the personal lives and fears of her characters far more interesting than the actual detective story that's the reason why I started reading.

So to start with it's all about Benedict the ex-monk who now runs a coffee shop, wondering where his life is going and amazed that Natalka, Ukrainian immigrant and care worker, should find him attractive; while Natalka frets as her mother has moved into the tiny flat and is being Very Ukrainian at her, and her brother is still over there in the fighting; and meanwhile elderly Edwin treads carefully around the possibility of a new relationship…

All of which could be fine, if the people were more interesting or if their activities were more closely tied into the plot, but it doesn't feel that way. Edwin and Benedict go to a writers' workshop, several regulars from which have dropped dead recently, and this gives Griffiths the opportunity to have a good dig at the sort of writer who was longlisted for the Booker once and cruises on that to impress the newbies for the rest of his life. And there's a decent slug of action leading into the climax. But… where's Harbinder Kaur in all this? She's still with the Met, so she turns up only occasionally when the investigators need an interface with the local police. There's a different detective to do the actual police work, and she's more or less a copy of Harbinder earlier in her career, and… look, this isn't the K and F Detective Agency series, it's the Harbinder Kaur series; she's by far the most interesting of the characters here, and I wanted more of her.

Things recover a bit by the end, though there's a very long epilogue which makes it clear to me that we're supposed to care far more about the soap-opera side than I did. I'll probably read another in this series if Griffiths writes one. But for me the first and third books are the best.

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Previous in series: Bleeding Heart Yard | Series: Harbinder Kaur

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