The Last Word Is Death: Historical mystery novel, perfect for fans of cozy crime by Faith MartinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The second outing for Arbie Swift, gentleman of leisure and author of the wildly successful travel book The Gentleman's Guide to Ghost-Hunting and his childhood friend/nemesis, vicar's daughter Val Coulton-James.
Arbie is visiting the Dashwood House Hotel, a newly refurbished hotel in the seaside town of Galton on the South coast. When he wrote the book he would spend a few days mooching around, doing a bit of fishing and the like, and frequent local hostelries to get tall tales of ghosts and ghoulies from the populace. He then wrote a chapters about the hotel and its surrounds and his comical attempts to spot the Headless Horseman or the White Lady. Being both informative and humorous,the book proved very popular and so his publisher is keen for Arbie to repeat his success.
As one might imagine of a vicar's daughter, Val is organised and relentless. She also has a bit of pash for Arbie. So when she discovers that Arbie is visiting the same hotel as the one her friend Beatrice has hired to celebrate her engagement, she agrees to join the engagement party. As a single woman of a certain age, her parents are hinting heavily that she should find a nice young man to marry so she thinks if only she could persuade Arbie to take her on as his assistant she could do something exciting and keep him on the straight and narrow.
The guests at the hotel, and the proprietors are a mixed group. Wealthy self-made men, society Bright Young Things, elderly but wealthy widows, antiques dealers, down-on-their luck divorcees, middle-aged women fond of a tipple, middle-aged couples, etc, its like an Agatha Christie novel brought to life.
I've really enjoyed these two books, although I find Arbie and Val hard to pin down as characters. Arbie would like to do nothing more than loaf around doing as little as possible, yet when it comes down to it he's the one with the razor sharp mind. Whereas Val might be practical and kind but she's a bit dim. DIgressing hugely, I feel that if Val did somehow trap Arbie into marriage he would be very unhappy, hounded from pillar to post by a domineering but intellectually inferior woman - he'd turn into the sort of man who hides behind a newspaper in his club. Couldn't Faith Martin give Val some qualities to make her his equal, like understanding human nature better? Even when the two of them discover clues Arbie's is front and centre whereas Val's happens offstage as it were.
Anyway, if you enjoy a sort of Brideshead/Bertie Wooster character ambling around solving crimes while trying to avoid doing any real work while a well-meaning vicar's daughter chivvies him along then you'll love this. The crimes are fiendishly complicated, lots of people have motives, but as Loyd Grossman used to say on that 1980s TV show 'The clues are there'.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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