feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2015-06-09 06:00 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2015-06-09 06:00 pm
REVIEW: Death Goes to Italy
Death Goes to Italy: Mabel Esther Allan Greyladies (2014, I think, I don’t have the copy to hand)
This fails, somewhat, as a murder mystery, although Allan’s specialty, a real feeling for the locations of her stories, shines through. Elinor and her relatively new husband David (their surname is Grey, amusingly) are taking her eighteen-year-old niece on an escorted tour around Italy. Their tour group is small in number, and as they first meet, they are all aware that they will have to spend a lot of the next three weeks in each other’s company. Naturally, they wonder how they will get on.
Rose, just out of school, and slightly older than most of Allan’s heroines in her books for children and young people, is excited to spend some time with that previously unknown breed: MEN, Elinor uses her artist’s eye to judge people’s personalities based on their faces and David is dismayed to find a Mrs Monk-Moreton is one of their party, as he knew her from fifteen years ago, during a dark period in his life, but, as the title of the book suggests, despite the warm spring sunshine of Italy, this is about to be another dark time.
Soon everyone, from the novice escort to twelve year old Selina Coryn, is regretting that Mrs Monk-Moreton is one of their number. She has the type of irritating trait someone on these types of tours always has – ‘My husband used to say...’, is extremely selfish, but worse than that, vindictive, despite liking to come across as a sweet old lady. She finds out secrets and makes them public, with hurtful results. Quite quickly, quite a few people have been vocal about wishing her dead.
And then, an already tense tour turns sinister, and the party are stuck in isolated Montecornazzo (there are a few similarities to Allan’s ‘Murder at the Flood’). One of the holidaymakers, who likes detective fiction, takes it upon themselves to make enquiries. But it is Eleano who finds the clues.
Sadly, I worked out who the killer was and why they’d done it before the heroine. One can see why the location appealed as an atmospheric setting for murder most foul, and Allan brings the travels around Italy to vibrant life, a contrast to the continually increasing tension, but you need a better and more complex plot for this sort of story to really fly.
This fails, somewhat, as a murder mystery, although Allan’s specialty, a real feeling for the locations of her stories, shines through. Elinor and her relatively new husband David (their surname is Grey, amusingly) are taking her eighteen-year-old niece on an escorted tour around Italy. Their tour group is small in number, and as they first meet, they are all aware that they will have to spend a lot of the next three weeks in each other’s company. Naturally, they wonder how they will get on.
Rose, just out of school, and slightly older than most of Allan’s heroines in her books for children and young people, is excited to spend some time with that previously unknown breed: MEN, Elinor uses her artist’s eye to judge people’s personalities based on their faces and David is dismayed to find a Mrs Monk-Moreton is one of their party, as he knew her from fifteen years ago, during a dark period in his life, but, as the title of the book suggests, despite the warm spring sunshine of Italy, this is about to be another dark time.
Soon everyone, from the novice escort to twelve year old Selina Coryn, is regretting that Mrs Monk-Moreton is one of their number. She has the type of irritating trait someone on these types of tours always has – ‘My husband used to say...’, is extremely selfish, but worse than that, vindictive, despite liking to come across as a sweet old lady. She finds out secrets and makes them public, with hurtful results. Quite quickly, quite a few people have been vocal about wishing her dead.
And then, an already tense tour turns sinister, and the party are stuck in isolated Montecornazzo (there are a few similarities to Allan’s ‘Murder at the Flood’). One of the holidaymakers, who likes detective fiction, takes it upon themselves to make enquiries. But it is Eleano who finds the clues.
Sadly, I worked out who the killer was and why they’d done it before the heroine. One can see why the location appealed as an atmospheric setting for murder most foul, and Allan brings the travels around Italy to vibrant life, a contrast to the continually increasing tension, but you need a better and more complex plot for this sort of story to really fly.