Book Review of A Fatal Winter: A Max Tudor Novel

A Fatal Winter by G.M. Malliet

After her clever and charming update to the classic village cozy murder in Wicked Autumn, the first Max Tudor mystery, author G.M. Malliet moves on to modernize, not the Manor House, but the Manor House murder in A Fatal Winter.

When Nether Monkslip's studly (and single!) vicar Max Tudor, formerly of MI5, meets Lady Leticia Bayard on a train returning from London, he finds her an anachronistic, autocratic bore. But when he learns that evening that she has died, apparently of a heart attack after hearing of her twin brother's murder, he regrets his lack of charity. His slightly guilty conscience and the expressed wish of both brother and sister to be buried from St. Eowald, Max's church, play right into the hands of his friend DCI Cotton, who wants Max on the scene to pick up information about the murder for the police.

Chedrow Castle is a stone medieval manor house built high on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was later walled and fortified on the land side to make it impregnable from all directions. Spy holes built into both exterior and internal walls enabled the lord of the manor to keep an eye out for invasion from without or treachery from within. It was occupied in this generation by Oscar, Lord Footrustle, his twin sister Leticia with her granddaughter Lamorna, and a cook and butler couple. But this year, the manipulative, tight-fisted Oscar had uncharacteristically decided to invite his disparate and far-flung relatives for Christmas. That proved a fatal mistake for both the elderly millionaire and his snobbish sister.

 

Oscar's daughter by his first wife, Jocasta, is getting a little long in the tooth for the ingenue movie roles that earned her modest success in Hollywood. Her younger husband, Simon, hopes to keep her sober and sane enough not to blow the lid off the festivities when she encounters her father's detested second wife Gwynyth and Jocasta's adolescent half-siblings, the "terrible twyns." After the divorce, that dreadful commoner Gwynyth got to keep the title, and her son Alec will be Lord Footrustle after Oscar. But while the title is entailed, Oscar's substantial personal fortune is not.

Like her twin, Lady Bayard also had three children. Her daughter had been killed in an accident, leaving an adopted daughter in her grandmother's care. After trying unsuccessfully to make a "proper" lady of the unattractive and fanatically religious Lamorna, Leticia prudently made use of the twice-orphaned girl as an unpaid lady's maid. Blood will tell, she thought, and Lamorna obviously didn't have the right sort. Randolph, Leticia's plummy oldest (a photographer of the rich and famous) came with his assistant, Cilla Petrie. They had a shoot in the area, and Cilla's makeup skills would certainly be required. Her younger son Lester flew in from Australia with his wife Felberta for the festive family reunion. Lester and Fester, as they are not-so-fondly known in the family, spend many hours surreptitiously assessing and photographing the treasures the castle has accumulated over the generations.

The "twyns," Alec and Amanda, may be the most wholesome characters in this toxic family brew. Cynical and sophisticated beyond their years, they treat their narcissistic mother and grasping relatives alike with even-handed adolescent contempt. They are impressed, however, by Max's MI5 background, and Amanda even offers him a full tour of the castle. While showing him around, she confides that someone might have tried to kill her father earlier, when an ancient piece of stone coping fell, narrowly missing him. Then Oscar alone got an apparent case of food poisoning, much to the careful cook's outrage.

The author offered enough red herrings in this book for a full dinner course, and I obligingly hared off after several of them. There were so many nasty characters that it was hard to pick just one for the murderer. The pieces finally came together for Max in a way reminiscent of Agatha Christie at her best, and a final clever and unanticipated twist kept me guessing right up to the Poirot-esque grand denoument in the library.

Like many second books in a series, A Fatal Winter was not quite as charming as the first. Perhaps it was the collection of Lord Footrustle's relatives who ranged from merely unlikable to outright detestable, or the claustrophobic setting that failed to hold my attention. While this was a quite decent spoof on the classic English Country House murder, with many flashes of the author's trademark sly humor, I missed the colorful and slightly dotty denizens of Nether Monkslip, and hope the author returns to the village for Max's next adventure.

Note: A Fatal Winter was published by Minotaur Books and will be released on October 16. I received a free copy in exchange for this review. Parts of this review appear on Amazon and Goodreads, under my user names there.

The Shirty Thirties: Tongue-in-Cheek Cozies

England's gracious country manors have probably hosted more fictional murders than the mean streets of any major city. They're just more discreet about them; preferring to sweep such embarrassing incidents under the rug, or at least keep them out of the newspapers! Like many readers, I can't seem to get enough of these nostalgic tales of luxurious lifestyles and leisurely weekends that aren't there any more, and was delighted recently to find a couple of new-to-me offerings.

A book tabled outside a used bookstore introduced me to the work of British author James Anderson and his lugubrious Detective Inspector Wilkins. Wilkins is a kind of counterpoint to Christie's Poirot: openly sure that he has been promoted beyond his ability and "not sanguine, not sanguine at all, M'Lord" about his ability to resolve the case at hand. After which, of course, he solves the crime quite handily through a series of brilliant Poirot-like deductions. The crimes take place at Alderly, the small (a mere dozen guest rooms, imagine!) but lovely manor house of George Saunders, 12th Earl of Burford, his wife Lavinia, and their daughter Gerry.

In The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cozy, Gerry invites her orphaned and impecunious friend Jane Clifton for a long weekend even as her Uncle Richard, a government minister, is preparing to conduct secret negotiations with representatives of a foreign power at Alderly. The Earl has invited a Texas millionaire and fellow gun collector with his wife and secretary, and the Countess expects a notorious sponger who "hangs around like a flu bug" according to the Earl, as well as an author researching Gracious Country Homes of Britain for an upcoming book.

Full house at Alderly this weekend, and a very odd mix, thinks the venerable butler Merryweather as he scans the guest list. And 13 at dinner, how very unfortunate. But as it happens, a French baroness traveling past has a fortuitous road accident and is invited to stay while her car is repaired. Poor Lord Burford is greatly relieved that he won't have to plead illness and dine alone in his bedroom to even the table after all!

Between the open-handed affability of the Earl and the social skills of his Countess, Alderly prides itself on its hospitality. However, its lavender-scented linen-clad beds must be pretty uncomfortable––or perhaps it was the thunderstorm?––but on Saturday night it seemed nearly everyone was creeping around the dark halls on clandestine errands, bumping and thumping each other, none of them on the, er, usual romantic business. The Sunday sun rises on two fewer guests, one found shot in the lake and the other found equally dead in a well-publicized secret passage. A fortune in jewels and a pair of rare dueling pistols have also disappeared.

This book is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek romp through mystery's Golden Age, with frequent allusions, both direct and subtle, to the famous fictional detectives and mysteries of the period. It has everything a proper country house-party needs: spies, thieves, blackmailers, murderers, as well as a very creative method of disposing of a body. The book included a map, but I really needed a list of the characters and a flowchart to keep track of the action. Who done it came as a complete surprise to me.

A true confession: Regency romances, aside from Austen's, bore me to tears. I overdosed so badly in my teens that the sight of an empire waistline on a book cover can drive me straight to another aisle. Despite this, I picked up regency queen Georgette Heyer's Why Shoot a Butler? for the charming vintage––and definitely not Regency––cover.

Frank Amberly is motoring to Graythorne, his uncle's country place, for a long weekend and gets exasperatingly lost in the dark and mist. Finally passing an Austin pulled over by the side of the road, he asks rather rudely for directions. An equally rude young woman standing by the car directs him back the way he had come.

As he cautiously turns the Bentley in the narrow lane, his headlights pick up a man slumped behind the starred windscreen of the Austin, his shirt bloody. The young woman won't give her name or come with him to the police station to report the death. While she is carrying a gun, Amberly determines that it has not been recently fired, so he leave her there and gallantly doesn't mention her presence at the scene to the police.

While the story line here was a little different from one of Heyer's romances, the villains were obvious and odious, and the love-hate relationship developing between Amberly and one of the suspects took up quite a bit of the book. Not a keeper for me, or an author I'll look for again.

Now I'm torn. How to spend the afternoon? Tennis, or maybe golf? Or curl up with a cozy fire and a book in the dear old library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves? Darling, please ring for tea. We'll have it in here, not in the drawing room––so cozy, isn't it?