Murder in the Parish - Faith Martin ***
By Brian Clegg
I like to read a police procedural on a regular basis as I find them strangely relaxing. This is the twentieth of Faith Martin’s novels featuring (former now) DI Hillary Greene. I picked it partly because I particularly enjoy a village-based or church-related murder (having written several myself).
Greene by now is a retired DI, acting as a consultant for Thames Valley Police (I never understand why some crime writers feel it necessary to make up fictional police forces – nice to see a real one) working on cold cases – here, a 30-year-old murder of a vicar who everyone liked that was never explained.
On the whole it works reasonably well, though it’s hard to give a cold case the same sense of urgency that a contemporary crime novel can achieve – and the conclusion here, put across by one of the characters on the last page ‘it all seems so sad and pointless’ is certainly quite apt. Given the characters don’t find the conclusion satisfying, it can be hard for the reader to be hugely enthused.
One thing that irritated me, though, was the total ignorance of the author about anything to do with clergy and the like. Throughout ‘reverend’ is used as a job title rather than an honorific, so Martin frequently refers to the dead man along the lines of ‘the reverend did this or that’. It’s as if she said of an MP ‘the honourable was a bit boring.’ Painful. We also have a witness who is a ‘Right Reverend’, wearing purple – which makes him a bishop. But he’s never called a bishop and is there ‘on behalf of the bishop’ – which makes no sense.
The extended title describes it as ‘an utterly gripping crime mystery full of twists’. It would be fairer to describe it as a readable crime mystery that fails to grip but rolls along reasonably well.
You can buy Murder in the Parish 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.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/04/murder-in-parish-faith-martin.html
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