Death in the English Countryside

Halfway through the book, I got really excited because I thought this was a book that was going to be about P&P and also have a P&P-ish plot to it, especially during the middle bit when Alex came under suspicion and DCI Quimby started being nice to Kate. What if DCI Quimby was actually the Darcy-esque character while Alex was Wickham? After all, the whole first half of the book seemed to foreshadow some sort of “appearance is very different from reality” theme which Kate apparently wrote some thesis about.

But such a plot twist was not to be. Instead, DCI Quimby is just another police officer and the romantic hero is still Alex.

The plot trudged along predictably enough, and I wasn't even surprised by the revelation of the murderer. I'd have pegged Eve as the most uninteresting suspect from the start, because she'd be so predictable. When Kate started getting excited about various details falling into place (but deciding that Eve definitely had to be the one who had sent her Kevin's camera because of the way she folded wires, really? Because no one else could fold wires in that same way? Talk about jumping to conclusions), I was actually bracing myself for a bigger plot twist at the end. What if it hadn't actually been Eve, and Kate had let her prejudices get in the way and suspect the wrong person when in fact it was actually someone that no reader would've suspected, a la Agatha Christie murder mystery. Unfortunately, again, that fell flat.

The premise of the book was really interesting, and for that I'd give it the 2 stars. It failed to impress with the conclusion of both the romantic and the mystery plots, however.