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....
