All over the place

This is a fun, lighthearted listen, and I can’t bring myself to hate it, but… boy this book is all over the place. The cover art and blurbs comparing it to Christie are misleading; it decides halfway through to be a murder mystery, but no investigation as such ever takes place, as it spends an awful lot of time on chick lit style antics with pretty two-dimensional, thinly drawn characters. The story keeps promising to set up intrigue (will there be another death? Will there be skullduggery?) but only delivers a few hastily thrown-together extramarital affairs. The author seems to delight in heavy handed literary references, but they detract rather than add to the story (an in-fiction book character is called Tintin, but it is not the actual Tintin, leading to a lot of confusing and pointless references to the Tintin movie and people dressing up as Tintin, but not that Tintin; a member of the administrative staff is straight up named Nurse Rachet, despite not being an actual nurse, because I guess if she was Mrs. Rachet you might not get the hilarious joke…?) A country house dinner party in the final third of the book seems like it is setting up the kind of classic murder mystery fare one expects, but fizzles disappointingly into dialogue that more closely resembles “My Dad Wrote A Porno” than anything else. All of that said, there are moments of comedy, and the author so clearly had fun writing it that it somehow salvages the rest.

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