Honey-Dew

This book is very well written, and laugh out loud funny in some parts. However, I found some of it to just be a little pointless. What was the purpose of the chapter about Alison's mother? I seemed like it was just stuck in there to fill pages, and did not serve to illuminate the story at all. However, I found all of the characters to be very well drawn (Miss Crabbe is one of the funniest characters I seen in a long time) and the book was a pleasant afternoon diversion.

AN ENGLISH MURDER by Louise Doughty is extremely well written and very readable--I read it in one afternoon. However, Doughty's story is not like other "short" mysteries--or long ones for that matter. Doughty is a very clever writer, and she has created a complex little tale. Doughty is obviously familiar with English murder mysteries. She has created a story for the ardent mystery reader, but one familiar with the English classics. To fully appreciate this book you need an understanding of the works of Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James and their personal reflections on the ambiguity of morality. This book is a morality play of sorts, and like the play within the play in Hamlet, there are mysteries within this mystery. Dorothy Sayers created a character, a young woman writer named Harriet Vines, who figures in her three best stories involving the detective Peter Wimsey. Some critics think Vines is a thin disguise for Sayers herself. AN ENGLISH MYSTERY contains two writers. The earnest newspaper reporter Alison Akenside lives next door to Miss Crabbe, a mystery writer. Miss Crabbe's favorite book is HAVE HIS CARCASE (Habeas Corpus) by Sayers. Miss Akenside discovered the bodies (neighbors who lived on her other side), and she is writing news articles about the discovery and subsequent investigation. At one point, the narrator (Doughty?) provides an overview of what Miss Crabbe thinks about finding dead bodies, a thought which she presumeably relayed to Miss Arkenside earlier. "The discovery of the body was the most important single event in a murder story - far more important than the murder itself, which ususally happened off-stage and quite right too. [Miss Crabbe] couldn't stand those modern novelists who went in for graphic garrotting and exploding eyeballs. How tasteless to describe all those horrible things happening to a living person." At this point in the narrative, Doughty is relaying Akenside's understanding of Crabbe's thoughts about Sayer's narrative of Harriet Vines' thoughts, and the reader is inside a loop involving five mystery writers. Doughty's writing is complex, laugh-out-loud funny at points (including a game of CLUE the murderer plays with the victims), sobering, and fairly accurate regarding the human condition. As much as we might like tidy little stories that put all moral ambiguity to rest, they are not reflective of real life. And, there are those pesky flies. Those damned flies.

When murder happens, reporter Alison wonders if it will rocket her to fame, but she does little more than wonder. Indeed, it seems past the capability of anyone in this quirky and well written novel to act at all--except in sudden bursts of murder.The murdered couple were part of a disfunctional family unable to cope with their child and the problems they faced. Alison's family was similarly disfunctional, with results that mirrored the murdered couple.The back cover promises that AN ENGLISH MURDER is a different kind of murder. Indeed it is. The mystery becomes the smallest part of this investigation into a community made up of members each of which is so obsessed with their individual problems that they cannot raise their heads enough to see the larger troubles that surround them. It is high praise indeed to say that Louise Doughty actually pulls it off.

A really good mystery novel. The book started out being deceptively slow, and so I was not really expecting much. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I had actually stayed up well into the early morning hours in my eagerness to read more. At the heart of this mystery is Gemma, the missing teenage daughter of the murdered couple. Is she another victim of the murderer/s or is she somehow involved? Another focus of the novel is Alison Akenside, an ambitious reporter of the local newspaper,and longtime inhabitant of the quiet village, Rutland.This is a book that draws you into the closed world Alison and Gemma. It's a novel about families: the tensions within, and what people see or refuse to see. The two storylines juxtapose and merge seamlessly. We get to see the realtionships that both Alison and Gemma have with their respective families, and the atmosphere in both cases is distintively jarring and stifling.Definitely one of the best mysteries I have read this year.

AN ENGLISH MURDER is an amazing read! It has been a while since I was so completely engrossed in a story which starts out being so conventional, and quickly turns the entire "village mystery" genre into something quite different. The murders of a middle-aged couple and the disappearance of their teenage daughter Gemma cause quite a stir in the quiet Rutland village where Alison Akenside is a reporter with the local paper. Besieged by national media, Alison sees it as an opportunity to make a splash with a story of her own.As we learn more about the dead couple, the daughter and Alison herself, the atmosphere becomes suffocating, and Alison more of an enigma. Fans of Ruth Rendell should rejoice over the discovery of AN ENGLISH MURDER.