‘Hemlock Bay’ by Martin Edwards.

Published by Head of Zeus,
12 September 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-03590980-3 (HB)

There can be no one more knowledgeable about crime fiction than Martin Edwards. In the Rachel Savernake series, Edwards combines his skills as a major writer and his knowledge of the Golden Age of crime writing. He also indulges his gift of coming up with truly portentous titles. Nothing good, we are sure, will ever happen in a place called Hemlock Bay.

The Prologue tells us that a murder has taken place. Of whom and by whom we know not yet. The first chapter is more explicit: we learn from the journal of one Basil Palmer, accountant unextraordinary, that another murder will take place – committed by him in the bijou Lancashire seaside resort of Hemlock Bay, the creation of a wealthy British man and his even wealthier American wife.

By coincidence – and in the way of the Golden Age there are lot of coincidences – the series protagonist, the mysterious but assuredly rich Rachel Savernake (who lives in Gaunt House) has just bought an Expressionist landscape featuring the very same bay, complete with a figure looking decidedly dead. Her entourage – more friends than mere servants – fails to see its charms. Likewise, a long-standing friend of hers remains unimpressed by a man who turns up at the offices of the national newspaper for which he works, insisting that he is clairvoyant and has had a vision of a death being planned in the very same location. You do not need to go to Denmark to discover a place where there is a good deal of rottenness. Or to agree with an allusion that surprisingly no character makes involving tangled webs and deception.

This is a very clever novel indeed. Not one of the large cast (apart from the goodies, and their relationship is deliberately opaque) is quite what he or she seems, and though one’s credulity is sometimes stretched to the limit, one simply does not care, such is the tour de force of the plotting.

Go on: exercise every last one of your little grey cells and have a most enjoyable read.
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Reviewer: Judith Cutler  

Martin Edwards is the author of 21 novels, including the Lake District Mysteries and the Rachel Savernake books, and also an acclaimed history of crime fiction, The Life of Crime. He received the CWA Diamond Dagger for the sustained excellence of his work. He has also won the Edgar, Agatha, CrimeFest H.R.F. Keating and Macavity awards, the Short Story Dagger and Dagger in the Library, plus the Poirot award for his contribution to the genre.

 www.martinedwards.com.         
www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com

Judith Cutler was born in the Black Country, just outside Birmingham, later moving to the Birmingham suburb of Harborne. It was an attack of chickenpox caught from her son that kick-started her writing career. One way of dealing with the itch was to hold a pencil in one hand, a block of paper in the other - and so she wrote her first novel. Judith has eight series. The first two featured amateur sleuth Sophie Rivers (10 books) and Detective Sergeant Kate Power (6 Books). Then came Josie Wells, a middle-aged woman with a quick tongue, and a love of good food, there are two books, The Food Detective and The Chinese Takeout. The Lina Townsend books are set in the world of antiques and there are seven books in this series. There are three books featuring Tobias Campion set in the Regency period, and her series featuring Chief Superintendent Fran Harman (6 books), and Jodie Welsh, Rector’s wife and amateur sleuth. Her more recently a series feature a head teacher Jane Cowan (3 books). Judith has also written three standalone’s Staging Death, Scar Tissue, and Death In Elysium. Her new series is set in Victorian times featuring Matthew Rowsley. Death’s Long Shadow is the third book in this series. 

http://www.judithcutler.com