A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson

"Truth is rarely pure and never simple...Selchester Castle in 1953 sits quiet and near-empty, its corridors echoing with glories of the past. Or so it seems to intelligence officer Hugo Hawksworth, wounded on a secret mission and now reluctantly assuming an altogether less perilous role at Selchester. The Castle's faded grandeur hides a web of secrets and scandals--the Earl has been missing for seven years, lost without a trace since the night he left his guests and walked out into a blizzard. When a skeleton is uncovered beneath the flagstones of the Old Chapel, the police produce a suspect and declare the case closed. Hugo is not convinced. With the help of the spirited Freya Wryton, the Earl's niece, he is drawn back into active service, and the ancient town of Selchester is dragged into the intrigues and conspiracies of the Cold War era. With a touch of Downton Abbey, a whisper of Agatha Christie and a nod to Le Carré, A Man of Some Repute is the first book in this delightfully classic and witty murder mystery series."--Back cover.

This was... OK? This was serviceable. I felt that the beginning was a bit muddy and I couldn't tell the difference between most of the characters, aside from the central few, but it got more engaging around the 50-75% mark.

The ending was incredibly predictable however. Not that I could've guessed the culprit, but the way we find it out felt a bit contrived (It was a deus ex machina on two levels. First a maid who was conveniently dismissed and therefore missing through the whole story suddenly just tells them she witnessed the whole scene, and then the actual “murderer” herself confesses out of a fit of conscience, I guess? It felt like Hugo and Freya did pretty much almost no detecting at all.).

Not only that, we have an ending “climax” scene which was straight out of a formula. The moment things started happening, I already knew exactly how things were going to play out to a tee. (Of course Hugo would independently deduce somehow that it was actually Guthrie who had killed Selchester, and of course he is unable to reach Freya to tell her about it before she unadvisedly wanders out into murky conditions to find Guthrie and, for no good reason, spill the beans to him and immediately after realise that he is the murderer just before he tries to kill her. Everything was just straight out of a textbook, imo. I could've excused such formula if it was done by, say, Conan Doyle or Christie because they were basically progenitors of such tropes, but in a contemporary book written decades after these tropes have become incredibly overplayed, it was just incredibly disappointing.)

It was OK. I'm indifferent to continuing the series - I didn't hate the experience but I felt like there wasn't much in the story that is appealing enough to me to want to read more of it.

With the thinnest relationship to espionage, or treachery against King and country, this novel disappointed in its lack of depth. Efforts at multi-dimmentional characters were stunted and details used in developmental stages lead to nothing in the end.

From start to finish, myriad details were left completely untouchrd:
-The Local Play
-What Selchester's niece was writing
-The missing notebook
- And all the gossip adsociated

The story was barely entertaining.