Unsurprisingly I thought this was another enjoyable book from Ann Granger. This series is getting long but it’s not getting boring or predictable. Though Granger does tend to stay with much the same kind of format for the stories they are all individual enough to make them interesting reads.

In this book Alan and Meredith are house hunting in the dead end village of Lower Stovey when Meredith comes across a dead body (I’ve got to the point with this series where I no longer worry about realism at the point where Meredith comes across a dead body, it has to happen and I don’t think the unlikelihood of it impacts the realism of the rest of the books) and Alan comes across a connection to a case he worked on twenty odd years back when he was a young and newly promoted inspector. What follows has nothing outstandingly unusual to recommend it except for excellent writing, great characters, a decent setting and a good plot.

In short it would be easy to write these books off as gentle country whodunnits but I think that they are thoroughly good books and I find them a lot finer reads than many others that try to bring the English village mystery into the twenty first century. I hope the series, which is already fifteen books long, keeps going for some while yet. There’s a lot of life left in both Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby.