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Jul. 31st, 2010 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaLITTLE KNELL, by Catherine Aird.
Cover copy: Colonel Caversham, once prominent in the British colonial service, has died and left his large collection of artifacts to the local Calleshire museum. Included in those artifacts is a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy and case, now the responsibility of one Mr. Fixby-Smith, Curator of the Greatorex Museum. What should be a simple moving job, however, is complicated by the local coroner, Mr. Granville Locombe-Stableford, since no body -- no matter how ancient -- can be moved without his consent. Which is how Detective Chief Inspector C.D. Sloan is dragged away from his more pressing concern with the burgeoning local drug problem and sent to the museum to sort out egos and red tape.
When the lid on the mummy case is raised, however, what greets the coroner, curator, and inspector is not what they inspect. Instead of the remains of the ancient Rodoheptah, they found the body of an unidentified young woman who has been dead only a matter of days.
Gender of detective: male
Blah. The twee!
Seriously, this author has fallen in love with her own words, and thinks we should be in love with them too. She has Done Her Research, and wants to show it off, which is bad enough: the fact that she does it as if she were being paid by the word merely makes it worse. It's all very arch, and sly, and coyly self-conscious.
Bah, I say, and Bah again.
It's as much (or more) about the drugs as it is about the murder, which doesn't help any: if one is writing one's best attempt at a proper English cosy murder mystery, then one shouldn't go getting drug-running in it, is all I'm saying. The part where you're not supposed to handle a mummy, because it might give you anthrax! And then, indeed, the murderer is given away because anthrax! Yeah, that's just the cherry on top.
The irony is that I've read a few of her mystery short stories, and the ones that don't feature Sloan tend to be far better than the ones that do. Ironic, given that Sloan himself doesn't suck, it's just everyone else around him.
*
Kris: Hi, Mariposa. Are you here to comfort me for my origami failure, or to taunt me with it?
Thia: Well, it is her.
Kris: True. Probably both, then.
Cover copy: Colonel Caversham, once prominent in the British colonial service, has died and left his large collection of artifacts to the local Calleshire museum. Included in those artifacts is a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy and case, now the responsibility of one Mr. Fixby-Smith, Curator of the Greatorex Museum. What should be a simple moving job, however, is complicated by the local coroner, Mr. Granville Locombe-Stableford, since no body -- no matter how ancient -- can be moved without his consent. Which is how Detective Chief Inspector C.D. Sloan is dragged away from his more pressing concern with the burgeoning local drug problem and sent to the museum to sort out egos and red tape.
When the lid on the mummy case is raised, however, what greets the coroner, curator, and inspector is not what they inspect. Instead of the remains of the ancient Rodoheptah, they found the body of an unidentified young woman who has been dead only a matter of days.
Gender of detective: male
Blah. The twee!
Seriously, this author has fallen in love with her own words, and thinks we should be in love with them too. She has Done Her Research, and wants to show it off, which is bad enough: the fact that she does it as if she were being paid by the word merely makes it worse. It's all very arch, and sly, and coyly self-conscious.
Bah, I say, and Bah again.
It's as much (or more) about the drugs as it is about the murder, which doesn't help any: if one is writing one's best attempt at a proper English cosy murder mystery, then one shouldn't go getting drug-running in it, is all I'm saying. The part where you're not supposed to handle a mummy, because it might give you anthrax! And then, indeed, the murderer is given away because anthrax! Yeah, that's just the cherry on top.
The irony is that I've read a few of her mystery short stories, and the ones that don't feature Sloan tend to be far better than the ones that do. Ironic, given that Sloan himself doesn't suck, it's just everyone else around him.
*
Kris: Hi, Mariposa. Are you here to comfort me for my origami failure, or to taunt me with it?
Thia: Well, it is her.
Kris: True. Probably both, then.