1999 mystery, twelfth of Granger's novels of Chief Inspector Alan Markby
and non-detective Meredith Mitchell. The wife of a local farmer is
found stabbed to death in the woods. He admits they weren't getting
on. But of course it's not that simple.
But I have to admit that the case itself is fairly
straightforward. The meat of the book is in the characters,
particularly Hugh Franklin the widowed farmer and his daughter by his
first marriage Tammy (who also didn't get on with the new wife).
Indeed, quite a bit of this gets away from the usual viewpoints of
Mitchell and Markby and follows Jane Brady, a sudden old friend of
Meredith's who's teaching Tammy and gets deputed by the school to look
into her home situation. (She immediately decides that Hugh can't be
a murderer, but has no personal motives, no no not at all.) And
there's no shortage of people whose lives would have been made a
little simpler by Sonia being dead.
Meanwhile Mitchell and Markby themselves are a bit on edge following
her rejection of his proposal, but a piece of fallout from the case
leads to Mitchell agreeing to move in just for a bit. (Which, one
feels, they might have tried before jumping straight to possible
marriage, even in those long-distant puritanical days of, er, 1999.)
To my mind, mostly for the series reader; much of the pleasure I got
from it came from revisiting these people rather than from the
specifics of the case. But on that basis I still enjoyed it.
Note that I will only approve comments that relate to the blog post itself, not ones that relate only to previous comments. This is to ensure that the blog remains outside the scope of the UK's Online Safety Act (2023).
Your submission will be ignored if any field is left blank, but your email address will not be displayed. Comments will be processed through markdown.