Murder by harp

Murder at an Irish Christmas by Carlene O’Connor is the sixth in a series featuring the same main characters. I hadn’t read any of the others which didn’t really matter for my understanding of the plot but I did find that now and then I lost track of which character was which and how they were connected which I might not have done had I already been familiar with the family at the heart of the story.

Siobhan O’Sullivan is a police officer (a member of the Garda) but in this story she has come away to Cork for Christmas with her extended family to a musical event because her brother’s fiancée’s grandfather Enda is a famous conductor. Enda is bad tempered and cranky and when he is found dead, crushed by a large harp, there are lots of suspects from within the family and also the musicians. The events take place in an isolated village on a clifftop and the guests find themselves cut off by a snowstorm which means that Siobhan has to find out what has happened without professional assistance and not knowing who she can trust.

As is common with any cosy mystery the setting is sentimentalised and the location of this story bears little resemblance to a modern Irish village. Usually I don’t mind this and just regard these books as set in a fantasy location but I did think that this author pushed things beyond what I could accept as believable. I also found all the characters were relatively indistinguishable and that there were too many of them. This might just be a matter of taste or it could be that starting later in the series disadvantaged me but I found this book a bit shallow and easily forgettable. It may be that I would enjoy things more if I had started with Book 1 and I advise anyone trying this author to do that.