Ann Granger, Mud, Muck & Dead Things

Nope, no Oxford comma for Ann Granger!

It's been a few months since I finished her 2009 novel Mud, Muck and Dead Things (with the additional cover notes of "Crime in the Cotswolds Just Got Deadly" as well as "A Campbell and Carter Mystery"), so to be honest I've lost track almost completely of what it was about, but I do remember that it was a fun read.

And I appreciated, too, that the back-cover summary was intensely misleading. It explains the setup, so the character and setting with which/whom we start the book, but we leave most of those details far behind as the chapters roll on. We remain in the area, broadly speaking, but the back-cover's implied main character becomes a plot point around which the real action and main characters orbit.

Classic English rural detective fiction, though: a body discovered where it shouldn't be, on a property with a shadowy history, in a community be-webbed with ill will and buried relationships, to be resolved by detectives themselves under various forms of threat. Those with money are, as is usually the case, rotten people, but some of those without much money are no less dodgy, but gosh, detectives (a) are terribly clever and (b) get lucky at just the right time.

A good read, if that's your thing, but it's faster to watch an episode of Midsomer Murders.