{"id":53,"date":"2011-12-28T13:29:35","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T19:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=53"},"modified":"2011-12-28T13:30:08","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T19:30:08","slug":"g-m-malliet-wicked-autumn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/g-m-malliet-wicked-autumn\/","title":{"rendered":"G.M. Malliet: Wicked Autumn"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/form>\n

G.M. Malliet is obviously a devotee of the golden age of mystery \u2013 Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham \u2013 and she takes the old formula made dear to readers and applies it to the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 This novel especially resembles Ngaio Marsh\u2019s Overture to Death<\/em>, where a particularly unpleasant village specimen is murdered at the piano warming up for an amateur theatrical.\u00a0 The vicar in Marsh\u2019s novel is described as looking like a \u201cRoman Coin,\u201d while in Malliet\u2019s, the vicar instead resembles the contemporary and dishy Hugh Grant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The vicar is at the heart of this novel, and to make things even more up to date, he has a mysterious past in the MI6 (or is it the MI5?) that comes back to haunt him in flashbacks.\u00a0 But make no mistake, this is an unabashed village cozy, where the most unpleasant woman in Nether Monkslip, Wanda Batton-Smythe, is murdered at the village Harvest festival, or \u201cFayre\u201d as the novel would have it.<\/p>\n

While Malliet\u2019s tongue is often firmly in cheek, with the descriptions of the citizenry frequently reaching a witty pinnacle that will have the reader chuckling throughout, she also hits on some real depth of emotion.\u00a0 This saves her village cozy re-creation from being one of cardboard.\u00a0\u00a0 The devastation of Wanda\u2019s widower is especially touching, but there are also some penetrating looks at the way the vicar came to his late in life calling, as well as an examination of various parent-child relationships.<\/p>\n

None of that stuff is heavy handed, just lightly touched on, but it moors the book and prevents it from being hopelessly twee.\u00a0 As the tricky mystery unfolds \u2013 Wanda has been felled by a fatal allergy to peanuts \u2013 village relationships are also explored.\u00a0 Because of the vicar\u2019s MI6 background the local constabulary is more than willing to turn to him, and let him do some gentle investigating on his own.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s almost jarring that the citizens of Nether Monkslip have cell phones (or mobiles), it\u2019s also made clear that the many participants in the \u201cFayre\u201d are local business people, a class of folks that would have had little standing in Christie\u2019s day.\u00a0 So while the world has turned on it\u2019s axis a bit, it\u2019s still a comfort to snuggle up with a village cozy, especially one as witty as this one.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little jewel of a first novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

G.M. Malliet is obviously a devotee of the golden age of mystery \u2013 Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham \u2013 and she takes the old formula made dear to readers and applies it to the 21st century.\u00a0 This novel especially resembles Ngaio Marsh\u2019s Overture to Death, where a particularly unpleasant village specimen is murdered at … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}