Review: Death at the Dinner Party

Death at the Dinner Party by Emma Davies
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Francesca Eve is a caterer who has been hired to cater for a swanky weekend party hosted by Mimi and Keith Chapman at their country home, Claremont House. Invited to the weekend are a number of Keith's potential investors in a new property development. The weekend is clearly designed to impress the potential investors with Keith's wealth, and no expense has been spared. Fran has brought along her friend's son Adam, a computer games designer, who wants to study the country house set up for a game he is designing.

Hosts and guests are almost universally unpleasant, the only nice people seem to be the resident gardener/handyman Derek and the housekeeper Rachel. Then Rachel and Fran find Keith dead in his study, which has been trashed and a valuable painting has been stolen.

Fran calls her old acquaintance DCI Nell Bradley (who apparently investigated Adam's mother as a potential murderer in the first book in the series) to investigate the scene, but when suspicion falls on Fran as the last person to see Keith alive, Adam determines to do some investigating of his own.

This was a pleasant enough country house whodunnit (without the aristocracy) but it relied heavily on the hosts and guests speaking freely in front of Fran and Adam, while I understand that they might be overlooked as 'staff', I didn't get the impression that any of the guests had that level of wealth. Also, this was generally recounted in conversation between Adam and Fran or between Fran and Nell so the reader didn't 'see' the interaction, only heard about it when it was discussed later. It was all telling and very little showing.

The discovery of the murderer, in fact pretty much all of the discoveries relied upon Adam's illegal hacking/spying skills. Now I get he designs computer games but some of the bugging and hacking he did stretched the realms of credibility, also he seemed to avoid inputting a password into a laptop at one point by restarting the computer and logging himself in as the Administrator - pretty sure that's not how it works.

Overall, the plot relied too much upon people just happening to 'see', 'hear', 'notice', or be in the right place at the right time. No forensic evidence, an arrest based on no evidence whatsoever, and two amateurs obtaining evidence in ways that would be laughed out of court. A fun read but I can't see this as a long series, particularly since I doubt many people would hire a caterer who has a habit of finding dead bodies.

Don't even get me started on the ending!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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