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gervase_fen
The back cover blurb : “There is a mystery to solve in the small town of Lockwood. It starts with the arrival of two secretive newcomers, and ends with a tragic death. Roderick Tanner QC has assigned law students Charlotte and Femi to the case. Someone has already been sent to prison for murder, but he suspects that they are innocent. And that far darker secrets have yet to be revealed…
Throughout the amateur dramatics society’s disastrous staging of All My Sons and the shady charity appeal for a little girl’s medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. Will Charlotte and Femi solve the case? Will you?”
This remarkable novel is constructed entirely from e-mail messages, WhatsApp exchanges, police interview transcripts, text messages, newspaper clippings, even Post-it notes, and manages to deliver an engrossing, slow burning mystery story with vivid characters and a relentless narrative pull. The amateur dramatic society’s travails give the book a superficial resemblance to an above average episode of Midsomer Murders : but there is also a topical, straight from the headlines international scandal informing the story, and the hidden lacunae in the e-communications that Charlotte and Femi are studying would have delighted Agatha Christie. (There are even clues in the e-mail delivery failed notifications….) There are also some funny jokes, and a hint of M R James in the closing pages. I guessed only a few of the darker secrets, and Mrs Fen, as I write this, has yet to finish the book but is making extensive use herself of Post-it notes.
