The Man With a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes

Inspector Richard Jury mysteries #1

The quaint, many-hued cottages lining Long Piddleton's High Street were capped with new snow and glittering in the morning sunshine. Pretty enough to be a Christmas card, the hamlet was, instead, the scene of two singularly gruesome murders.
Martha Grimes's delightfully British novel of detection introduces Inspector Richard Jury, an affable, pragmatic investigator who has a winning way of ignoring protocol and playing his own canny game. Jury is dispatched to the quiet Northants village of Long Piddleton at Christmastime to help solve a spate of murders that have confounded the local constabulary.

[From inside front cover.]

Ok, liked it. Perfect audiobook for a long drive. The characters grow on you, as does the body count in a Midsomer kind of way.

Overall I enjoyed how this novel was written, especially the denouement. However, I found I had trouble keeping up with who was who as far as the characters were concerned. I felt the author could have given the reader more reminders throughout, since there were a lot of characters and backstories. There were also too many murders for my liking... I know she wanted her debut to be a wild ride but five murders just seems like too much. I know Grimes's method for deceiving the reader was to bombard them with too much information, but it also made it hard to follow and a tad too long. I had trouble keeping up with who died and how and where. That said, I enjoyed the fair play—how you can solve the murders along with the detective—like in the classics. There is a certain feeling of satire or parody of the detective classics, especially in the funny British names like “Long Piddleton”, and the caricature-like characters.