Review: Naked to the Hangman

Naked to the Hangman by Andrew Taylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

And now to the eighth and final (for now) book in the series set in small town 1950s England featuring DCI Richard Thornhill and newspaper editor Jill Francis.

Richard's past as a policeman in Palestine has come back to haunt him. His former boss Jock has arrived in Lydmouth to warn Richard that a young man they knew back then is in England, hell-bent on revenge for the deaths of his family. Richard has been instructed to take several weeks of leave by his superior officer as everyone is worried (as we would say nowadays) about his mental health.

Lydmouth is moving (slowly) with the times and its first coffee shop has opened, managed by a cockney-Italian woman Mrs Merini and her teenage daughter Gina.

Meanwhile the dance school is preparing for the Annual Ruispidge Charity Dance, with much consternation as young Walter Raven was promised to young Emily Brown but would now like to escort Gina Merini who he has been making cow eyes at in the café every day. Emily Brown's purse has gone missing and her mother is convinced Gina is responsible, touting her opinions around the local newspaper and the police station, but Edith Thornhill isn't so sure, she saw the woman who accompanies the dancers on the piano (Miss Buckholt) loitering around the coats at the time the purse is alleged to have gone missing.

Richard's second child, Elizabeth, is friends with Walter's sister Gwen and the two of them are often to be found playing detectives, tailing people around Lydmouth and looking for clues. Richard's wife Edith is coming into her own now the children are slightly older, her former training as a teacher and being the mother of three children has equipped her for managing people, children and committees. However, despite Edith now being far more like the interesting, accomplished woman that Jill is (and despite Edith and Jill developing a sort of friendship), Richard seems just as unhappy as ever, but just unwilling to do anything about it.

This felt like the series had run out of steam (and perhaps should have stopped wen Jill decided to return to London at the end of book six). What I enjoyed about the earlier books was the interactions between Richard and Jill as they each brought their skills to solving the crimes. That has gone and now the two circle each other but never really touch base. Also, another thing I liked about the earlier books was the ongoing development of the relationships with the minor characters who didn't just appear in one book never to be seen again. However, in the last two books I have felt much more that new characters are introduced purely for the plot (or as Jill's potential love interest) and then dropped immediately afterwards. What's happened to Charlotte and Bernard - they were two larger than life characters who have disappeared almost completely (its like when characters from the soap opera Neighbours move to Sydney as a euphemism for leaving the show).

As noted in my review of the seventh book, there are a lot of very obvious typos and spelling mistakes which should have been picked up - galling to pay full price for a book that hasn't been properly edited. In one instance where there is an issue around whether a shoe is on the left foot or the right foot of a murder victim it says there are shoes on both feet in the crime scene photo!

Wrapping up this series, I also think that Andrew Taylor's Marwood and Lovett series may be going in a similar direction, he's got them together/in love and doesn't know what to do with them so he has fabricated a talking-at-cross-purposes disagreement to hold off progressing the relationship.

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