RogerBW's Blog

Flowers For His Funeral, Ann Granger 17 December 2024

1994 mystery, seventh of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Alan Markby and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. At the Chelsea Flower Show, the pair run into Meredith's old school friend Rachel (who turns out to be Markby's ex-wife) with her new husband Alex. But it won't be a long acquaintanceship.

Of course after Alex (foreign, rich) drops dead, both of our principals end up helping out the widow (who is a shameless manipulator), and indeed I think this is the first time in the series that Markby has been involved as a bystander rather than through his police job. That's interesting, but we end up in a claustrophobic village with a domineering mother, her cowed but resentful son, and a constant niggle that even apart from the murder and its sequelæ things just aren't quite right.

Which is fine, but the revelation of the truth rests on an unheralded rabbit being pulled out of a hat (to the extent that I checked chapter numbers to be sure I hadn't got an edition that missed one). At least one of the murders is not only pointless but utterly out of character for what we eventually learn about the murderer.

There are bits that do work, for me particularly the descriptive prose and Meredith's early investigations, but even allowing for Meredith's tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time this feels like a novel in which the investigators don't so much solve the mystery as bear witness to it.

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Previous in series: A Fine Place For Death | Series: Mitchell and Markby

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