Murder on the Royal Crescent by Harriet F. TownsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
It is December 1936, Dora Wildwood is a junior librarian at the London Library and an aspiring detective. Her godmother Dreda asks her to go to Bath to see what is wrong with her (Dreda's) brother Lord Frank Meroe and his companion/servant Bridgend. Apparently Frank was recently attacked in the street and when Dreda saw him he looked terrified.
When Dora gets to Bath, specifically the Royal Crescent she discovers that Frank and his neighbours have been friends since childhood, many of them growing up on the Crescent. Bridgend and Frank grew up together, Bridgend actually saved Dreda from the fire which engulfed their ancestral home and between them Bridgend and Frank saved several items from the fire. Caroline and Evangeline Palmer were friends of Frank's and the older half-sisters of Frank's fiancée Daisy who was mysteriously killed on the Crescent in 1916. Pargeter Thicknesse was friends with Frank and his older brother Lord Dursley, an intrepid adventurer in his day, Pargeter was wounded in WW1 and now needs a stick to get around, assisted by his son Joseph. Gerald St John didn't live on the Crescent as a child but he was friends with Frank and Pargeter before the war and has recently moved back to Bath where is an antiques dealer and 'fixer' with his young and glamorous wife Leila.
When Dora gets to Frank's house all of the friends are gathered for the monthly Discussion Society meeting where they (naturally) discuss the work's of Bath's famous writer Jane Austen. Dora can feel the tension between the parties, but the evening is cut short when one of them is murdered in a way very similar to that of poor Daisy Palmer - exactly 20 years to the day before.
Dora recommends that the local police call in Scotland Yard, and in particular Detective Inspector Fox, someone she has had dealings with in the past, albeit they last parted under a cloud. But the more they investigate the more motives they uncover for both murders.
This is a difficult book to review. I honestly disliked the book intensely for at least the first third, maybe even half, of the book. It was all an info dump. Having finished the book and scanned the start for pertinent facts for the review I can see all the information was useful but should have been trickle-fed to the reader slowly, I felt like I was drowning in characters and names and back-story about Dora's ex-fiancée, her forbidden love, the spat with DI Fox etc. Then it suddenly started to get interesting as the threads started to pull together, even if sometimes they then pulled in a completely different direction. Leaving me at the end rather enjoying it overall. I also enjoyed reading the author's notes at the end about how much of the story is based on real events at the time, places and people.
Overall, although it could be read as a standalone I think the reader (ie me) would appreciate the info-dump at the start more if they had read the previous books in this series as it would act as a reminder of what occurred previously. I will definitely look out for the previous books and the next book in the series.
There are also hints of a new role for Dora in the future.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment