Reading Number SIX – A cosy crime novel

Frances Brody has written a series of crime novels set between the wars with her female detective Kate Shackleton as the main character – see here for a review. She recently started a new series set in the 1960s in an open prison for women – see here for a review of the first installment. The second of the prison set books is Six Motives for Murder which I picked up from the book table in Sainsbury’s in January of this year The book is in excellent condition and I suspect that it was bought new and then donated after one reading.

The main character of the book is Nell, who is the prison governor. The story also features some prison officers and a few prisoners. Obviously, you can’t write about all the inmates and the officials in detail but I never got a feel for the size of the operation or the number of staff that Nell manages. In this book the prison has been asked to cater a local wedding and it is on the day of the festivities that a man, the father of the bride, is found dead. The author also includes what look like unconnected subplots among the villagers and also in Nell’s life, but later in the story some of these join up with the main plot.

The point of view, therefore, moves between the prison, the wedding party, an older couple where the husband has depression, several older residents of the village who are unhappy about the sudden death of many friends, the police officers investigating the murder, the prison officers, and a couple of the inmates. There’s a lot going on in the book and it seems scrappy, on occasion, because we don’t spend a lot of time with any character except Nell. The reader knows everything that is going on, except the identity of the murderer, but the characters only know some of it. I did find the murderer’s identity quite easy to work out, but I do read a lot of crime novels.

The author tells us, in a note, about the work that she has done to make this story as authentic as possible and I don’t disbelieve her, but it all seems very contrived and unreal, or at least it did to me. I have read plenty of unrealistic cosy murder novels in my time, and enjoyed them, but this one lacked the lightness of touch that those books usually have. I didn’t hate this book but I didn’t find it as entertaining as I would have liked. I will pass it on to Oxfam to resell to someone who may appreciate it more.