Emily Rodda

A genuinely enjoyable collection of puzzles - although deceptively marketed!

Jennifer Rowe's detective Verity Birdwood, a TV researcher-cum-PI with a mousy appearance but a brain like a steel trap, appeared in five engaging puzzle mysteries during the 1980s and 1990s. I'm forever disappointed that there weren't more. Birdie is great fun as a detective, and Rowe's mysteries are right up my alley: they're not dense or laden with additional plot (she's no Dorothy L. Sayers). No, they're classic puzzles; the narrative and the characters are merely window dressing for a game of logic with the reader. (This will sound overly mechanical to some crime fiction lovers, I recognise.)

Death in Store is something a little different: a series of 8 short stories in which Birdie saves the day. The book is under 200 pages, so the stories are required to dispense with any unnecessary miscellany. Several are told to us in retrospect, whether over coffee with her best friend Kate or drinks with trusty policeman Dan Toby. They range from the intricately plotted (puzzles where the reader feels like they could almost solve the murder with one more clue... only to realise Rowe gave you everything you needed) to the semi-"hard-boiled, i.e. where the fun is more in watching Birdie assemble clues using pieces of knowledge we didn't have access to. Some mystery writers (Conan Doyle) are better in short story; others (Christie) come alive in novels. Rowe - at least in her Verity Birdwood guise - seems to handle both with aplomb. The short story format suits Birdie well, as we get an avalanche of clues which only her logical mind can dispose of in record time. Of course, the downside of a mystery short story is that inevitably there is less time for the reader to grappled with the problem, so it's a 50-50 proposition.

I should say, however, that I'm not a fan of Doubleday's tricky marketing! The title of the book is that of the final short story in the collection. If you were to read the blurb, or the inside jacket cover, you'd suspect this was a novel (and a "holiday mystery" novel, at that). The fact that there is no table of contents would back you up on that suspicion. Were the publishers concerned that murder short stories wouldn't sell? I can only assume they were. The first and last stories in the book have a Christmas theme, but those in between are completely eclectic. It's a strange decision, that seems to me to build bad faith with the reader. Nevertheless, it's been 27 years, I suppose I can let that one slide.

A pleasing volume.… (mehr)

Clever. Very clever.

Margot Bell rules over her luxury makeover retreat in the country with an iron fist. A new batch of guests arrives and shortly find themselves temporarily rained in. Before the first day is done, someone lies dead. And the five guests and five staff on hand are the only suspects. Unluckily for the murderer, one of those guests is our beloved Verity Birdwood.

I thought I had read all of these novels as a kid, but I don't specifically recall this one. It's a tightly-plotted mystery that benefits from Rowe's almost preternatural ability to know just what the reader is thinking. Some suspects are too obvious; others make no sense at all. Just when you think the author has slipped up, she blindsides you again.

Rowe's trademarks are all in evidence. Some can be annoying to readers unfamiliar with this type of crime fiction: her tendency for characters to speak in full paragraphs, all the better to help us understand where people are; the slightly theatrical bent of dialogue (after a death, every character has to do the stereotypical "she has - I mean had - some matches in her bag" emotional slip-up); and a slightly surreal feeling in the denouement when characters who have previously been tough become weak, or those who have been frozen in shock for half of the novel suddenly feel strong enough to pronounce a gripping monologue.

But in a way these are what I enjoy about Rowe's novels. Her crime fiction is purely about the puzzle. There aren't any subplots about love or career, like the overly twee mysteries of Joanne Fluke, nor is excessive time wasted on the psychology of supporting characters. If something is included here, it's likely either clue or obfuscation. Rowe plays to her strengths with an isolated setting (trickily maneuvered so that our favourite cop duo, Toby and Milson, can slip in during a gap in the weather) and a sense of the clock ticking down. From the murder, it's only about 10 hours until the final chapter, and Birdie is on the go every second of this time. The solution is - to my mind - satisfying, being a logical outpouring of what has gone before. The solution is almost too simple, so that I never thought of it, yet at the same time it completely made sense of what seemed like implausibilities or logical leaps.

Good wholesome bloody fun.… (mehr)

Good, clean, murderous fun.

It's been 20 years since I read the Verity Birdwood novels as a crime-fiction-loving youth, and it's been marvellous to rediscover them. In Murder by the Book, Birdie investigates the death of a renowned author on the premises of her friend Kate's workplace. Much as in [b:Grim Pickings|1371032|Grim Pickings (Verity Birdwood, #1)|Jennifer Rowe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1211710360l/1371032._SY75_.jpg|1360885][b:Grim Pickings|1371032|Grim Pickings (Verity Birdwood, #1)|Jennifer Rowe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1211710360l/1371032._SY75_.jpg|1360885], which was set almost entirely in two neighbouring houses, this sequel is set almost entirely in or within sight of the five-storey heritage publishing house near Sydney Harbour. This creates an atmosphere of swirling doubt and fear, a world where murder is always close by, but also threaded into the everyday lives of these characters.

From the list of characters on the first page to the recurring clarifications of building geography, it's clear that Rowe enjoys the "nuts and bolts" of classic detective fiction. The astute reader needs to keep track of times and locations (always conscious of potential red herrings) as well as character history, strange coincidences, and the most mundane of clues. As in the first book, Rowe is scrupulously fair with the reader, leaving every clue in plain sight, but obfuscating the surrounding facts to deceive. Now that I'm on to her style, I picked up on many of the clues without being able to figure out how they linked together. (If there's a flaw in this type of crime lit, it's that characters often don't sound like characters; they're required to give a monologue or obsess over who else was in the room with them so that it goes beyond natural dialogue and into evidence.)

I didn't quite enjoy this as much as Grim Pickings but I'm nevertheless keen to read the rest of the series again. Partly it's the nature of the killings: (moderate spoiler to the overall solution rather than specifics) whereas the family in that book all had nebulous but possible motives, I soon came to the conclusion that only 2 or 3 of the suspects were really viable given that the cast includes three groups - the old employees, the new employees, and the authors. Once I had that narrowed down, it felt less like I was bamboozled by the plot and just like there was one wall standing between myself and the culprit. Maybe that's not a fair reason, but I wasn't as thrilled by it. Perhaps it's that Birdie doesn't play a large role for the first two-thirds of the book, or that I didn't feel like the atmosphere was as evocative as the previous novel.

Still, Birdie comes across strongly on the page: this scrappy researcher who hides her wealthy upbringing and her intellectual charm so well. She's a fun character, aided by Kate (her Captain Hastings) and the smarter-than-they-seem police. And the larger-than-life personas of the writers make for a constantly engaging novel.

For me, one of the joys of Rowe's series is the anthropological. This book is only 30 years old, but gosh how the world has changed. Characters wait for the evening newspaper; police are waiting several days for evidence to be available to them; and I suspect the media would have cottoned on to much of the drama much earlier if this book were written in 2020! It must be true of many novels, but revisiting crime fiction from (just) within my lifetime - given the genre's focus on small details - feels like a journey to a land one vaguely remembers, but which now seems so very far away.

So, a fun entry in the series but I wouldn't say it's the best one to start with.… (mehr)