Death Comes to Lynchester Close

Death Comes to Lynchester Close by David Dickinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m about to shout. It’s an alert for a spoiler not of my making but—would you believe it?—of the publisher’s, and my aim is to prevent you from seeing it. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T LOOK AT THE BACK COVER! Don’t even be tempted. There’s a really catchy hookline there (which I’m sure somebody is exceedingly proud of) that renders the first three-quarters of this investigation (and therefore the book) a tad redundant. Once I’d read it I couldn’t unread it, so with increasing impatience I spent an age ploughing through what would have otherwise proved an intriguing enough plot, waiting for the various investigators to twig what I’d already been told was going on. Way to kill off a reader’s interest! Why Little, Brown allowed this to happen is anyone’s guess.
So, hopefully if you take my advice, what do you get? A cozy mystery set in the imaginary English city of Lynchester a couple of years before the First World War. The presiding detective, who is summoned down from London, is Lord Francis Powerscourt, a peer of the realm. He has a wife, Lady Lucy, and a friend, Johnny Fitzgerald, to assist him—in addition to the fawning local police in the shape of Inspector Vaughn. Lord Francis and his crew don’t get much of a look in when it comes to descriptions. Though it’s the first book I’ve come across in this series I believe it’s actually the fourteenth, so perhaps we’re meant to know what they’re like by now. By contrast, all the other characters are succinctly and sometimes humorously drawn, each one distinctive and fairly rounded. I could imagine meeting them in the real world.
The writing style is unique. There’s hardly any scene-setting, and transitions between scenes can be as abrupt as a single sentence. It reminded me of the stage directions in a play. The bulk of the narrative is delivered as a series of two-person conversations, some of them lengthy, with very few of the component speeches receiving any attribution (such as “Powerscourt said” or “replied the Dean”). Yet I was seldom at a loss to know who was speaking and, once I got used to it, I found the style refreshingly different from the other cozies I’d recently been reading. There’s a wealth of history here too, but I suspect you’d need to know what you’re looking for in order to recognize it. It’s incorporated so well that it’s practically hidden.
But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know!

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