The Book Guild, 28 Sept 2024.
ISBN: 978-183574053-8 (PB)
The narrator, Robert Rowland, observes at the start of the book that newspaper reports of a body discovered by a man walking a dog have become a cliche. However, this is what happens to Robert when he is out walking his two dogs along a footpath in farmland near his home village of Braybrooke.
The victim has been shot in the head and, although he is face down, Robert is
reasonably certain that it is the body of the farmer who owns the land, Edmund
Ayling. Naturally Robert contacts the police, and it is soon confirmed that his
identification of the victim is correct. Robert tells the two detectives
everything he knows about Edmund Ayling but because he commutes every weekday
to work in London, he soon realises that he knows much less about life in
Braybrooke than his wife, Lucy, who hears all the village gossip from her
cleaner and from her regular attendance at the village WI.
Most of the sheep in a flock belonging to Edmund have vanished and it seems that the police are favouring the theory that he was killed while trying to prevent the rustlers, possibly local Travellers, from stealing his stock. However, Robert and Lucy think that the truth of the crime lies in Braybrooke and, jokingly adopting the personas of Holmes and Watson, they start to make their enquiries.
Soon Robert is more deeply involved in the life of the village than he has ever been before. He gets to know Jack, a young man who is a member of the local Traveller community, who works as a farmhand on Edmund’s farm. He also meets Andrew, Edmund’s younger brother, and Amelia, Edmund’s estranged wife, who have both moved into Edmund’s farmhouse and are in dispute about Edmund’s will. Most troubling of all for Robert are his brief encounters with Lucy’s cleaning lady, Lesley Logan, who has an obsessively jealous husband. Lucy and Robert are conscientious about keeping the police informed whenever they discover any clues but as they continue to probe into the secrets of the village they find themselves in unforeseen and extreme danger.
Braybrooke
is a stand-alone novel set in and around the village. It starts with a
Preface that describes a murder that occurred in 1932 in the village which
Braybrooke represents, and it is this story that inspired the plot and the
nature of the village in the book. It describes a quiet rural setting and a
small village where everybody knows everyone else’s business, although quite
often the things they claim to know are more rumour and suspicion than actual
fact. This is a gently paced book with an interesting plot and likeable
characters that should be enjoyed by those who like traditional mysteries.
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Reviewer:
Carol Westron
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