MALICE IN THE COTSWOLDS
BY REBECCA TOPE
THE
BLURB:-
Thea Osbourne,
accompanied by her beloved spaniel Hepzie, has had her fair share of
unfortunate occurrences whilst house-sitting. Her new assignment for
the mysterious Yvonne Parker is no exception. The somewhat
unsettling village of Snowshill has Thea on edge as soon as she
arrives, and soon enough she becomes entangled in another horrifying
murder.
Thea, alongside friends
Drew Slocombe and DS Sonia Gladwin, works to uncover a sinister plot,
where seemingly separate lives are entwined in strange and secretive
relationships. A malicious web of suspects leads Thea through the
lives of the villagers and their secrets, to London and beyond.
THE
REALITY:-
This was a wonderful
trip through the Cotswolds, which is somewhere I hope to visit next
year. I have Painswick Rococo Garden and Littledean Jail lined up
for snooping around (using Gloucester as my base- I am a city chick,
after all!) Come to think of it, whilst I'm in Gloucester Little
Miss Macabre here will check out where Fred West kept his (now
flattened) murder home...
Enough of my
ruminations! Back to the book, and I got a really good feel for this beautiful area, with a good selection of likeable and unlikeable characters
thrown into the mix. All of the characters seemed relevant to the
story, somehow, in terms of understanding what made our main
protagonists tick. Horrible would include Stevie, Blake, Maggs and
Paul (my opinions only- you might like them), and likeable included
Clara and Gudrun (opinions might differ with the latter, too.) I also
found Karen unlikeable, which is really odd, as she's a character
who's in a coma throughout the storyline! I think she's one person I
just wanted conveniently... gone. One character that I disliked
immensely, to the point of immediately loathing, was Yvonne- she
seemed off, somehow, right from the start- and if you
(POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!) continue reading the book you might find
out why. Yes, this book was capable of igniting emotion within me,
which is really what a good story must do.
This book is part of a
series, with an explanatory map drawn in the front of the novel, and
I'm already reading another in this series. I like that the book
didn't create expositions, as can happen with some serials; and
everything was neatly tied up. This was also an easy novel to put
down for a while, and pretty easy to recapture after leaving it
alone. I did note that the author seems to like the word "importunate" though. It may be weird of me to notice this, but I'm
sure it popped up several times throughout the story...
The big disappointment
for me was that Snowshill Manor, and its history, didn't really
feature at all, although they were mentioned. I would have loved
some of the intrigue to have centered around there. And the big plus
was that you didn't really find out who the double murderer was until
the very last page, which kept me wanting to learn more. Oh, and I
do hope that Thea and Drew get it together properly at some point in
the series....
