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A review by crazygoangirl
The Cornish Coast Murder by Ben Allen, John Bude
lighthearted
mysterious
slow-paced
3.0
Reading my first John Bude, another Golden Age mystery writer that I was unaware of. Happy to find this on Storytel although I didn’t like the narrator Ben Allen.
This has all the hallmarks of a cosy English mystery. There’s a murder in the first chapter on a dark and stormy night in Boscawen, a tiny Cornish village. There are quite a few quirky characters behaving suspiciously and then there are the vicar and doctor duo, Reverend Dodd and Dr. Pendrill, who are cosy crime aficionados themselves and meet every Monday evening at the Vicarage, for dinner and crime chat!
The mystery begins promisingly enough. A magistrate, Julius Tregarthan, locally unpopular, is found shot through the head in his house. His young niece Ruth and his servants, the Cowpers are allegedly clueless as to the reasons. An author, Ronald Hardy who is intimate with Ruth Tregarthan has disappeared and Constable Grouch and Inspector Bigswell are on the case, although they are stymied by dead-end clues and the vicar’s ‘intuitive’ deduction theory! Eventually, all is peachy & satisfactorily sorted.
I enjoyed this book although I felt it was quite slow and definitely too long. Ronald Harry’s disappearance for example was ridiculous and quite silly when explained! Also rather silly was the vicar’s insistence on the innocence of certain suspects because of his ‘intuition’. Hardly the strong point of an amateur sleuth! I was rooting for Inspector Bigswell (although I thought he was too patient and accommodating of the vicar’s methods), and thought it quite unfair that the solution was ultimately dependent on local knowledge that the vicar didn’t share with him 🤷🏼♀️ In fact the vicar didn’t share much with the Inspector while being privy to most of the police investigation!
I liked Bude’s writing which is why this wasn’t as boring as it could have been, but I didn’t care about the Ruth-Ronald romance at all and toward the end I just wanted to be done! Bude has two more mysteries published by the British Library and I will eventually read those but not anytime soon.
This has all the hallmarks of a cosy English mystery. There’s a murder in the first chapter on a dark and stormy night in Boscawen, a tiny Cornish village. There are quite a few quirky characters behaving suspiciously and then there are the vicar and doctor duo, Reverend Dodd and Dr. Pendrill, who are cosy crime aficionados themselves and meet every Monday evening at the Vicarage, for dinner and crime chat!
The mystery begins promisingly enough. A magistrate, Julius Tregarthan, locally unpopular, is found shot through the head in his house. His young niece Ruth and his servants, the Cowpers are allegedly clueless as to the reasons. An author, Ronald Hardy who is intimate with Ruth Tregarthan has disappeared and Constable Grouch and Inspector Bigswell are on the case, although they are stymied by dead-end clues and the vicar’s ‘intuitive’ deduction theory! Eventually, all is peachy & satisfactorily sorted.
I enjoyed this book although I felt it was quite slow and definitely too long. Ronald Harry’s disappearance for example was ridiculous and quite silly when explained! Also rather silly was the vicar’s insistence on the innocence of certain suspects because of his ‘intuition’. Hardly the strong point of an amateur sleuth! I was rooting for Inspector Bigswell (although I thought he was too patient and accommodating of the vicar’s methods), and thought it quite unfair that the solution was ultimately dependent on local knowledge that the vicar didn’t share with him 🤷🏼♀️ In fact the vicar didn’t share much with the Inspector while being privy to most of the police investigation!
I liked Bude’s writing which is why this wasn’t as boring as it could have been, but I didn’t care about the Ruth-Ronald romance at all and toward the end I just wanted to be done! Bude has two more mysteries published by the British Library and I will eventually read those but not anytime soon.