RELEASE DAY!!!!
The Shadow of Memory
by Connie Berry
The title is foreboding, and the setting in part reflects that, with a Victorian sanatorium for the insane as a backdrop. The rest, however, is English cosy crime of a high order. There's the female amateur detective, Kate, an American with the obligatory professional police love interest. Many of the sprawling cast know almost everyone else, and the long ago crime stretches its tangled roots through not only the immediate village but out to several surrounding towns. All it needs is a bit more emphasis on police procedure to be a fitting entry in a Midsomer Murder episode.
The author has some sneaky humour in there, as the sanatorium's former name was Netherfield Hall. Yes, like that famous Jane Austen line, “Netherfield Hall is let at last.” Another nod is to cosy mystery royalty via the name of Brightwell, as in the famous author of the Mrs. Jeffries mysteries.
Although the (first) body is found early, there is a bit of meandering around and chatting to people before essential questions get asked and the detecting begins to gather momentum. Since the person who holds most of the early clues is actually Kate's roommate, the delay in getting down to brass tacks is quite noticeable although neatly papered over with mild British drama around the engagement of Kate to widowed policeman Tom over the objections of his mother.
That said, our amateur sleuth, an antiquarian dealer, is competent, intelligent, and apparently lacking any deep psychological traumas which is a nice change from many modern sleuths. Moreover, she is almost always thinking about the investigation and analyzing what she has learned about her unfolding collection of mysteries.
I use the word "collection" advisedly. Not only is there mystery around what happened to a family 50 years ago, in a strangely modernist house we will all find familiar from various Poirot TV episodes, but there’s also mystery around a possibly forged antiquity, and over who in the current generation could possibly have enough at stake in these decades-old crimes to go after a bunch of seniors who were teenagers at the time and didn’t think they knew anything of import about any of it. Thrown in are some sidelights on the incestuous nature of modern corporate and developer finances, and on how some family money and connections persist across generations.
The only real drawback I found is the sprawling cast: so many minor characters are coming and going in this mystery that they start to pile up and blur by the midpoint. There are Netherfield's board members and their forebears and current families, the original teen sleuths from the 1960s, their descendants/inlaws and survivors, other police and art experts, waitresses, care home attendants, and an old man whose only purpose is to offer a single pointer. Added to the series characters (this is the 4th) the sheer quantity of names gets a bit much to recall. It could have been streamlined by having fewer named characters offer more information each, or some info coming from sources other than fleeting conversations with characters who never appear again.
Overall, the book is an absorbing read, as winding as any hike through the history and hills of an English countryside, where each twist of the trail promises new revelations, rain may fall, and there's a cosy pub with a crackling fire at the end of it all.
#Netgalley #RandomHouse #cosymystery #TraditionalMystery #art #ArtHistory #ArtForgery #InsaneAsylum #TeenSleuths #1960s #castofthousands #EnglishVillage #ConnieBerry #EmilyBrightwell #NetherfieldHall #Poirot
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