Murder at Bramhurst Chapel - Izzie Harper ***

By Brian Clegg

The ‘cosy crime’ genre has become massive, particularly thanks to books where a small gang of amateurs somehow beats the professionals to the solution (think The Thursday Murder Club and The Marlow Murder Club). Generally, this approach has one huge flaw which is that I can’t imagine any police force (even grudgingly) accepting help from amateurs. Izzie Harper arguably gets around this effectively as her amateur sleuths are the wife, mother and daughter of a DCI.

Central character Ellie (the wife) and DCI Dave have just bought a thirteenth century building once the private chapel of a manor house to convert it to a house. (The cover illustrator – or perhaps AI as this seems to be self-published) clearly has no clue what private chapels look like, giving us an impressive church with spire.) To be honest, this purchase suggests to me that Ellie and Dave are incredibly naive and perhaps not suited to the detecting game. They buy a nearly 800-year-old building without a survey, are surprised that a building that would have no damp proof course is damp and apparently haven’t even bothered to look at the village it’s in, as the place is a complete revelation to Ellie when she ventures out into the terrible sink estate it is.

No, of course it isn’t. It’s a picture perfect English village which, despite being a village can somehow manage to sustain every artisanal shop you can imagine. Meanwhile, human remains turn up in the chapel garden. The plot mostly revolves around the cold case of uncovering who the 1950s female remains belong to and how she ended up dead. But there are plenty of strange goings on in the present day, ending with some drastic outcomes.

Getting to the bottom of all this is quite a nice intrigue, with good use of inaccurate evidence, and had it been limited to the cold case, I think it could have worked well. But the sinister present day activities seem totally out of proportion to the reason behind them. It just didn’t feel plausible.

Not badly written, and good for a few hours gentle reading, but ultimately it all feels highly unlikely.

You can buy Murder at Bramhurst Chapel from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.