1998 mystery, eleventh of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Alan Markby
and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. A local lawyer and minor European
luminary has his head bashed in outside his kitchen door, after
Meredith had given a stunning young woman a lift to his house…
I wonder whether there may have been a mismatch of feeling here.
It's clear from the beginning that the victim had been deceiving his
wife about something (it turns out, indeed, to be rather more serious
than the obvious thing one might expect) and I found that I had no
sympathy for him at all. When the confessing killer said of the victim
"He had no thought for anyone but himself. He had no compassion. He
had no honour." they only expressed what I'd been feeling since the
beginning. Yes, I can accept that murder disarranges society, and that
once a person has killed and thinks they've got away with it they're
more likely to do it again, and all the rest of it; but really once
all the secrets had come out this particular killing felt more like
pest control than murder.
But fair enough, we get some decent investigation on both the police
and the amateur sides of things, though basically everybody involved
is unsympathetic and the identity of the killer is obvious almost at
once. We also, though, have the ongoing relationship between Mitchell
and Markby, which feels stalled at the meta level as well as within
the story: they're living apart but spending time together, he wants
her to move in and get married, he presses her for an answer, and the
eventual resolution is… that they will carry on as before. What is the
point of having this in a series book? If I could have skipped
straight from book 10 to book 12 without missing any developments, why
make it a series at all?
So all in all I didn't find much to recommend here. (And the title has
no bearing on the events of the book, always a minor niggle.) I'll
carry on with the series, but if I'd started here I might well not
have bothered to go further.
(I learn today that Granger died last September. I have been
pleasantly surprised by the extent to which I've enjoyed her books
even when they aren't of the first rank in quality.)