A Cotswold Killing
On the first night of her first engagement as a house sitter, Thea hears a scream outside. The next day she finds a body in the garden.

This felt more plausible than most amateur 'tec cozies, with a good awareness of how difficult it can be to understand people's relationships when you come into a new community and aren't aware of their histories.

A Cotswold Ordeal
Another house sitting job, another corpse.

I'm not sure I really followed what was going on with the climax and roundup here but that may be because I'd been travelling for 24 hours.

Death in the Cotswolds
When Thea and Phil attempt to combine a romantic getaway with clearing out his deceased aunt's home, Ariadne, one of his childhood friends, finds a corpse in the local barrow.

Unlike the others so far in this series, which are told in the third person from Thea's point of view, this story is a first person narrative by Ariadne, an interesting character in her own right, even if I did want to shake her at times.

A Cotswolds Mystery
Thea has another house sitting job and of course one of the neighbours is murdered and the evidence seems to point to Thea's client's mother.

Phil was mainly offstage in this one with Thea's daughter playing his police connection role. Now that Thea is planning to expand her business and is setting up a website, how long before she starts getting reviews urging potential clients to avoid her for their neighbours' sake? ( )

There’s something of a whiff of self-publishing about ‘A Cotswold Mystery’, which would be appropriate, as self-publishing is something of a middle class occupation and this is, certainly, something of a middle class murder mystery.
Starting with the positives, author Rebecca Tope has absolutely, perfectly, and almost definitively captured the atmosphere of certain Cotswold villages. Anyone who has passed through that part of the world will know that the place is full of tiny, well, ‘places’ is probably the best description. They’re not villages in the strict sense, they don’t have a pub, or a shop, or a post office, or even a church, they have no discernable centre, not even a duck pond where they used to drown witches or foreigners. These ‘villages’ are more often just a collection of dwellings that have come together through the mutual gravitational attraction of Cotswold stone and are grouped for convenience’s sake under the name of a village.
What’s more, she’s accurately captured the change in these places that has been brought about by the railway, and London. Rich people either buy their second homes here, or abandon their spouse here while they are in the capital working on acquiring money and their second wife.
The people behind the twitching net curtains, as described by Tope, do seem like the sort of people you might find behind the net curtains of dwellings in this sort of community. People who buy bloody big houses surrounded by huge fields tend to lead quite solitary lives. People who have lived in the area for generations see their family priced out of buying locally and so don’t want to speak to their new neighbours.
Frankly, with all the isolation, sexual frustration, resentment and access to farm machinery, it’s a wonder the homicide rate isn’t on a par with downtown New York.
As for the plot, it’s a whodunit? Thea and her spaniel are house sitting, an occupation that mostly appears to involve defrosting meals from the homeowner’s freezer and taking her dog on long walks, noticing things.
Like the dead body in the garden.
And we’re off.
On paper, this must have looked like a really good idea, an outsider arrives in the ‘village’, there’s a murder, and everyone is under suspicion, except possibly the spaniel.
On, er, Kindle, it doesn’t quite come off. One gets the sense that this novel is the pulling together of a lot of notes made on a rather a nice jotter and based around an idea that the author had one afternoon while driving through the countryside.
There is promise here, but it never quite delivers, which makes reading the story something of an exercise in frustration. What it needs is a good edit and a lot less teasing. Thea’s spaniel has an odd name, but the origin of it is never explained. Not even at the end of the book. Why? It’s annoying and, what’s worse, this sort of teasing shows a certain disrespect for the reader. Certainly I made it point of principle not to be arsed to Google the name, if the author wants me to be in ignorance of the significance of long, Biblical sounding names to spaniels, then so be it. However, I know a (very) little about pedigree dogs (having watched Crufts once on the telly) and know that breeders delight in giving their dogs names as obscure as they are stupid, meaning that Thea could simply have picked up the dog from the breeder and not, as many owners do, given it a family name, knowing that it’s significantly easier to bellow ‘Rex, PUT THAT DOWN!’ over the common than it is to shout ‘Champion-Herald-of-the-Dawn ex vee PUT THA…oh, you have’.
A book then that has a tremendous sense of place and which, thanks to that, has an occasionally pleasingly sinister tone but which is, very unfortunately, badly let down in terms of plotting, which needs to be a lot, lot tighter. This is supposed to be a murder mystery.
In the end, it’s a disappointment. And it’s a disappointment that it’s a disappointment. Somewhere in here there’s a good novel built around a solid premise, but it never quite achieves its potential. ( )