Review: Six Motives for Murder

Six Motives for Murder by Frances Brody
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

This is the second in a series although it can easily be read as a standalone.

Its 1969, Amanda Chapin, daughter of local landowner Lancelot Chapin, is getting married at the lcoal church with the reception at the family home Brackerley Manor. The women from Brackerley Open Prison have been invited to cater the wedding breakfast and the whole village is invited. Amanda's mother died when she was only six years old and her father remarried a much younger woman, Penny, who has been more of a sister than a mother to Amanda. Indeed, it is a local woman, Gloria Thwaite, who looked after Amanda when she was a child, and as a result she and her husband are given the honorary titles of auntie and uncle.

But at the wedding reception one of the inmates, Linda, goes out looking for another who has been on break for too long and finds Mr Chapin slumped on a bench, stabbed through the heart.

it seems as though there is no shortage of potential suspects, with rumours of infidelity, money problems, secret babies, unpopular property development plans, fortune hunters, and suicides which could all be motives for murder (and there's six of them). Added to which, three residents of the local old people's home, also part-owned by Mr Chapin, appear to doing their own version of The Thursday Murder Club and have dragged Nell Lewis, newly appointed governor of the prison, into their investigations.

it is down to DS Angela Ambrose to piece together the witness statements, wedding photos, and other evidence and uncover the murderer.

I haven't read the first book in the series (although I did recently take advantage of a 99p offer and will be reading it shortly) and so i was expecting Nell to be the 'detective' in this series but while her personal and professional life do feature strongly, she was definitely on the periphery of the investigation.

I did enjoy this, once the murder happened. Prior to that there seemed a lot of explaining, presumably to set up each of the potential murderers. It kept me guessing to the end.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

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