A carefree tale that’s often enjoyable despite occasional clichés.
An English gentleman finds his inheritance threatened as he’s accused of murder in this mannered comedic mystery.
It’s 1920, and Maj. Heathcliff Lennox, a veteran of the First World War, receives distressing news from his butler, Greggs: There’s a dead man lying on his doorstep—truly an uncommon circumstance in sleepy rural England—which kicks off Menuhin’s often humorous story. Lennox has no idea who the man might be nor how he ended up delivered, like a parcel, to his property, but then he finds a sheet of paper hidden in the corpse’s coat with a stranger’s name written on it: Countess Sophia Androvich Zerevki Polyakov. To confound matters further, he later finds out that his uncle, Lord Melrose, has recently asked the very same Sophia to marry him. She turns out to be a supporter of czarist rule who recently escaped the carnage of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Sophia proves herself to be something of an imperious sort, herself; she’s taken over the quarters that had long been reserved for Lennox himself, and she dismissively expels Cooper, the aging butler of the manor, from the premises. She even kicks out Lennox’s dog—before bluntly announcing that Melrose has amended his will to leave her the whole of his considerable fortune. Lennox suspects that something is awry with this whole arrangement—particularly after he overhears Peregrine Kingsley, a longtime lawyer and counselor to Lord Melrose, engaged in intimate and conspiratorial conversation with Natasha Czerina Orlakov-Palen, who’s Sophia’s niece and the fiancee of his own cousin, Edgar. Then Lennox discovers Sophia’s bloodied body, shot dead with his own gun. He’s the principal suspect, and now he’s compelled to devote his Christmas to clearing his own name.
Menuhin conveys the entire story in lighthearted quips and genteel witticisms, hewing to the tradition of classic, madcap British comedy. For instance, it’s revealed that Lennox’s family has been historically plagued by the aforementioned Kingsley, who’s as boundlessly unscrupulous as he is incompetent; it’s never clear why he’s never been dismissed, but his presence is a constant source of delight to readers whenever he appears. The relentlessness of Menuhin’s comedic style can grow exhausting, though, as it sometimes has the feel of a literary stand-up routine. Some of the jokes barely elicit a polite chuckle, as when Lennox chats with Greggs: “Greggs was right; the man looked very dead. ‘Did you check?’ I asked. ‘No, sir—back’s been playing up.’…‘Your paunch is more of an impediment than your spine, Greggs.’ ‘As you say, sir.’ ” For the most part, the characters tend to be stock caricatures rather than nuanced and complex people. For example, Sophia is, at best, a vaudevillian sendup of the stereotypical Russian aristocrat; even her accent is gratingly ridiculous. However, the murder mystery itself is a fine diversion, and readers who may be looking for some very silly entertainment—which is neither too serious nor too literary and which makes minimal demands—will find this a companionable read.
A carefree tale that’s often enjoyable despite occasional clichés.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-916294-70-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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