A Fine Place for Death

This book is the sixth in the Mitchell and Markby series, and the series just seems to keep getting better. These are true English village mysteries with colourful casts of characters, deft plotting and a tricky little mystery to figure out. In this book a young girl's body is found lying in a ditch and Markby has to figure out what happened. We have Meredith Mitchell now living in Bamford, so that puts her right in the thick of things. When she befriends a troubled teenage girl, she doesn't realize that it puts her right in the middle of a murder investigation. She works with Inspector Markby to try to bring a killer to justice. This is really a delightful pair of sleuths, and I am really enjoying this series.

Two teenagers turn up missing, then dead, in separate incidents in this quiet English village. One is the daughter of the lord of the manor. The other comes from a working class broken home. Is there a serial killer on the loose? Are the girls as innocent as they seem? Are their murders even connected? What about the ensuing deaths? Meredith does some amateur sleuthing, and CID officer Markby, who wants to marry her, wishes she'd just keep out of it. But the evidence she discovers proves invaluable, so much so that she nearly ends up dead as well. What's a copper to do? This somewhat slow-moving mystery sustains interest with its settings (a 200 year-old mausoleum, for one), and its colorful cast of supporting characters (the village drinker, not an alcoholic, mind you, the insane lady of the manor, the man-hunting American secretary), and its Englishness. Granger is a decent writer and a good storyteller.

Ann Granger is one of the few authors around today who still knows how to write an authentic British mystery. She is one of the best.