RogerBW's Blog

2014 police procedural mystery. Nobody is terribly surprised when one of the residents of the upmarket care home Marigold House is found dead; it's what the place is for, after all. But the post-mortem throws up something unexpected.

And I will admit I was buoyed in my enthusiasm for this book by having read some of Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club, not written until some years later—which I didn't finish, so my comments on it will be in my end-of-year wrap-up post. But let's just say that, while it shares the background of people waiting to die in a care home, this book does the whole thing much better.

There are plenty of false leads, and this book shows the procedure of the investigation as in effect a series of prunings of what starts as an unmanageable tree of possibilities—or perhaps that's just the way I see it anyway. There's a resident of the home who's clearly having far too much fun baiting the police, but does that mean he's actually done something he can be arrested for?

Compared with the first book, Smith is a bit less smugly right all the time, which I can only see as an improvement. Other people get more of a chance to contribute to the investigation. Once more there's one big coincidence which lets the thing be resolved; I hope that won't become a habit. But the progress from "what was dun" and "whodunnit" to "well, can and indeed should they be prosecuted for it" is an unexpected and welcome one; there's nothing terribly profound here, perhaps, but it's well-handled and not preachy.