This is my first exploration into the Fethering mystery series, centred around Jude and her friend Carole as they play amateur sleuth to try and solve the murder of a famous author. The problem is, Jude is the last person to see the victim alive, and she seems to have a very obvious motive. Jude and Carole must work to clear her name, using all their skills to find the real murderer before the police arrest the wrong person.
The majority of this book reads like a cosy mystery, taking place in a village where everyone knows everybody else and there are no secrets between neighbours. Burton St Clair is visiting the local library to give a talk on his new book. There is a confrontation with one of the members of the audience following drinks at the end of the evening but otherwise it is a fairly uneventful event (except for maybe the broken wine bottle). Following the event, St Clair offers Jude a lift home, which she ends up refusing and leaves him in his car in the library car park in order to walk home. The next morning St Clair is found dead in his car.
I really enjoy the story of an amateur sleuth, as it is normally an easy relaxing read, and this one was no exception. This story is easy to solve but it is not about the who it is more about watching the main characters get to the same conclusion as the reader. This requires a sympathetic and relatable main character, and this can definitely be found in Jude. I loved her perspective on the whole thing, and found her to have realistic reactions to the situation that she found herself in. I was also pleased to see the police inspector was reasonably clever, and no-one could blame her for following the clues to the conclusion that Jude was the perpetrator. However, the other police constable was presented as the usual “idiot” which I found a bit irritating.
It was also interesting to see Carole doing her part in the resolution, as most of the time in these stories the sidekick can remain in the side-lines, but Carole has a part to play in the overall story.
However, towards the end of the book, things became a tad rushed which meant that it did not have the impact that it could have. It also annoyed me that all at once the police stopped following Jude as their main suspect and believed her conclusion despite the fact that for ¾ of this story that had appeared to have thought her guilty. I was not disappointed in the who but there is very little chance for the reader to uncover the why, which sometimes can make me feel a bit cheated. This is not so obvious in this case as it became clear fairly early on that the why would remain elusive until the resolution, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating for me personally.
The story as a whole was very enjoyable, however, I am very much of the opinion that a crime novel can be judged on the quality of the ending, and in this case it felt rushed and a little bit unbelievable compared to the rest of the book. I think I would have preferred it if there had been a few more pages in order to get more of a conclusion. I will probably pick up the rest of the series, as I did enjoy the main part of the story and I love the writing style which I found to be engaging
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