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A review by siria
Death at the Chateau Bremont by M.L. Longworth
2.0
Filmmaker Count Étienne de Bremont takes a fatal fall from the window of his family's château near Aix-en-Provence. Local judge Antoine Verlaque and his ex-girlfriend and law professor, Marine Bonnet, investigate the case. M.L. Longworth clearly has a love for this part of southern France, and succeeds in bringing Aix and its surrounding area to vivid life. I'd happily read a travelogue from her.
Ultimately, though, Death at the Chateau Bremont is rather disappointing. The plot's a bit clunky and lacking in actual detection (I guessed the murderer and the motivation quite early on, and I'm normally crap at things like that), as is the prose (omniscient third person that changes point of view from one paragraph to the next is messy and a pet hate of mine) and the dialogue (why repeatedly break what the reader takes as a given—that the characters are "speaking" French and we're just reading an English-language rendition of that—by randomly scattering French words and phrases like non and entendu and le juge throughout? Are we supposed to believe that they're being somehow more French here? If Longworth wanted to convey the fact that everyone's really speaking French more forcefully, she could have Gallicised their syntax more, or used direct translations of French idioms).
I could have put up with that if the main characters were charming. Sadly, they're not. They're prime examples of what happens when an author thinks they're producing complicated, flawed protagonists, but fails to let those flaws have any real impact on characterisation or the progress of the narrative. Marine is a law professor who's Not Like Those Other Girls, with a penchant for looking at herself in the mirror and thinking about how she's beautiful in spite of her tangle of red curls, oh what a flaw, and who chose to become an academic because of the regular hours (um) and because you get the summers off (what). Marine, however, is much more bearable than Verlaque. He's handsome, well-educated, intelligent, made an investigating magistrate at an unusually early age, from a wealthy family, descended in part from English nobility, a snob, a gourmet, a cigar enthusiast, women constantly fall into his bed because of his Intense Magnetism although he's rude and a chauvinist... Longworth seems to have confused self-satisfied male assholery with a three-dimensional male character, but this reminded me of nothing so much as the BBC's terrible Sherlock. There's no chemistry between Marine and Verlaque and by the end of the book I was actively rooting against their getting back together.
(When shelving the book, I noticed that the cover blurb draws comparisons between Death at the Chateau Bremont and the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Wow. That takes some brass ovaries, publishers.)
Ultimately, though, Death at the Chateau Bremont is rather disappointing. The plot's a bit clunky and lacking in actual detection (I guessed the murderer and the motivation quite early on, and I'm normally crap at things like that), as is the prose (omniscient third person that changes point of view from one paragraph to the next is messy and a pet hate of mine) and the dialogue (why repeatedly break what the reader takes as a given—that the characters are "speaking" French and we're just reading an English-language rendition of that—by randomly scattering French words and phrases like non and entendu and le juge throughout? Are we supposed to believe that they're being somehow more French here? If Longworth wanted to convey the fact that everyone's really speaking French more forcefully, she could have Gallicised their syntax more, or used direct translations of French idioms).
I could have put up with that if the main characters were charming. Sadly, they're not. They're prime examples of what happens when an author thinks they're producing complicated, flawed protagonists, but fails to let those flaws have any real impact on characterisation or the progress of the narrative. Marine is a law professor who's Not Like Those Other Girls, with a penchant for looking at herself in the mirror and thinking about how she's beautiful in spite of her tangle of red curls, oh what a flaw, and who chose to become an academic because of the regular hours (um) and because you get the summers off (what). Marine, however, is much more bearable than Verlaque. He's handsome, well-educated, intelligent, made an investigating magistrate at an unusually early age, from a wealthy family, descended in part from English nobility, a snob, a gourmet, a cigar enthusiast, women constantly fall into his bed because of his Intense Magnetism although he's rude and a chauvinist... Longworth seems to have confused self-satisfied male assholery with a three-dimensional male character, but this reminded me of nothing so much as the BBC's terrible Sherlock. There's no chemistry between Marine and Verlaque and by the end of the book I was actively rooting against their getting back together.
(When shelving the book, I noticed that the cover blurb draws comparisons between Death at the Chateau Bremont and the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Wow. That takes some brass ovaries, publishers.)