Do you know that feeling when you are reading something which part of you wants to draw out as long as possible, while on the other hand you want to know what's going to happen next and can't wait to return to the story at the end of a long day? This is exactly how Murder at St. Anne's was for me.
From the first book on, I liked Oldroyd, Andy and Stephanie, as well as the other regular cast such as Oldroyd's sister, his daughter and his partner. Much of the rest of the cast changes with every case, as does the setting. But they all have two things in common: One, they are set in Yorkshire (and usually in places I know relatively well), and two, they are as much about the whodunnit as the howdunnit.
In Murder at St. Anne's, a female rector is killed in her own church. She was an important figure for the movement of women aspiring to leading roles in the church, but very popular within her congregation. Could the murder still have a political background? Or are there more sinister forces at work - such as the ghost of a monk who is believed to haunt the premises and who, apparently, was responsible for more than one mysterious death in the past?
Oldroyd and Andy set about to investigate in their usual manner. They get snowed in at Knaresborough (where the murder has happened) and have to spend a night in the vestry, where they have set up their temporary headquarter.
By the way, that was another thing I instantly loved when reading the first words of this book: It starts on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon in mid-January, which is almost exactly when I began reading it (only that it was a Friday for me). Don't you love reading books set at the same time of year as the one you are actually in at the time of reading?
Once again, I have to thank Monica for originally pointing me towards this excellent series. Now I suspect it will be a rather long wait for the next instalment.
And I thank you for pointing me towards this series a while back. I requested them from my library and they ordered them for me! I was surprised that they ordered the whole series and then saved them on hold for me as each arrived. Such great service from my city library! I enjoyed them very much!
ReplyDeleteYour library sounds great, and I am glad that you support them. Borrowing books instead of buying them (especially when they are the kind of fiction we are unlikely to re-read or consult again) is also a lot more sustainable - good for your library, good for you, and good for the planet :-)
DeleteLoved this book - and the whole series.
ReplyDeleteMe, too!
DeleteCan't find that author here, but since I'm heading back over the Pond next month, will have to see if I can pick up one or two then. :)
ReplyDeleteThey were available for me no problem at Amazon's Kindle shop.
DeleteThere is a poem by Wallace Stevens, Debris of Life and Mind (The Poetry Hour online).
ReplyDelete*It is as if we were never children,* Stevens writes.
You are in touch with your inner child, Meike.
A child enjoys a book set in winter when it is winter outside.
At this time of year I crave the Provence sunshine of Laurence Durrell (Caesar's Vast Ghost) or the interminable heat of Gavin Maxwell's Iraq (A Reed Shaken By the Wind).
A lady priest murdered in her own church is a terrifying scenario: priests are vulnerable in today's broken societies. I might just risk *Murder at St Anne's*.
And I like what I hear about D.C.I. Oldroyd, a reassuring figure.
As Stevens ends his poem:
*Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.*
I had to go find that poem, Haggerty. It had some perfect lines. My favorite: 'Besides when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves'. I knew that to be true.
DeleteMuch of what I thought and felt as a child is still very present for me, John/Jack. Maybe it is easier for me because I still live in the town where I was born and raised, with short stints in other places until I was nearly six.
DeleteWhen I think of summer reading, Robert Sabatier's "Kinder des Sommers" (of course I read it in German back then, to this day I wouldn't be able to master a whole book in French). I keep wanting to re-read it but so far have not gotten round to it.
Debby: I'm delighted you understood the poem.
DeleteThe sleepless poet summons the presence of the Muse (can she be summoned any more than blue skies can be summoned?) in his moonlit bedroom.
There's an element of the French Symbolists in the way he describes the Muse, she is a divinity though not the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation.
He begs her to stay and speak of familiar things, rather like a needy child.
Meike: It is good fortune to live in the town where you were raised.
*The past is not dead. It is not even past,* as William Faulkner said.
I remember reading the obituary of Robert Sabatier: Paris in the Thirties has been a major part of my reading as much as London and Berlin in the Thirties: the time in which my parents came of age and millions like them, all over Europe.
Going back to books we loved is always daunting.
To me Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were as good as I remembered as are all the Sherlock Holmes, HG Wells as well as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Le Grand Meaulnes, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Sons and Lovers. The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury read as well today as they did when I was a a teenager.
Jack
I should have added Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote to the list: I read them as a teenager and they are just as good today.
DeleteR.L. Stevenson described his Edinburgh childhood in the poem that prefaces his unfinished masterpiece, The Weir of Hermiston:
I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir.
The Lammermuirs are grassy hills, between East Lothian and the English border.
Stevenson reminds us, as if we need reminding, that children know sadness.
JH
I listened to it as audio book around New Year. Didn't get round to writing a review (yet) (usually find that a bit harder when I've mostly listened to a book rather than read it "with my eyes") But I felt much the same about it as you - including the weather and the time of year! :)
ReplyDeleteBy now, it feels as if we know Oldroyd and the other regulars, doesn't it!
DeleteI have been to Knaresborough in the summer, but the book gives a good description of what it is like there with snow.