3.5* ( )

While on holiday with his wife Inspector Littlejohn is called on to help solve the death of Dr. James Macintosh, the Bishop of Greyle, the famished parson.
A well-written story and a decent mystery.
A NetGalley Book ( )

I was mildly amused, and maybe, if I hadn't dragged out the reading over a couple of weeks, I would have enjoyed it more. As it was I was confused by the number of characters--I couldn't keep them straight. Bellairs' stylistic quirk of ending many sentences with ellipses grated a bit too. And fundamentally the solution wasn't that interesting to me. ( )

The Famished Parson of the title is a bishop who is found dead, caught in the undergrowth, suspended part way down a cliff. An exhausted Inspector Littlejohn is on holiday with his wife in the nearby seaside town. He is roped in to the investigation by the local police, much to the dismay of his wife.

The plot is intricate, and several interesting characters emerge, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I might have because of the way the author handled speech. There were times when there were as many as 5 or 6 characters talking together, without any clues as to which of them was speaking. I found this frustrating and irritating, and was close to giving up on the book. i did get to the end, and there was a satisfactory conclusion, but it has rather put me off this author. ( )

Although most people automatically have PD James as their go to British Crime Mystery author of note, George Bellairs deserve some of that love as he is a sorely underappreciated writer from a bygone era of greatness in literature. He was quite prolific and could write detailed, realistic stories that pulled you into the time and settings of his crimes.

This book was perfectly Bellairs and showed off his shattering talent with a well-written and expertly plotted mysterious narrative. There are his classic touches of humor, his charming and eloquent word choices, and of course his intricately complex and well-developed characters.

Along with his perfectly written personalities, Bellairs knew how to write settings that provided such vivid imagery you felt you were walking alongside his characters as you saw the world around them through their eyes.

His plot provided plenty of red herrings alongside the real clues so it won’t be overly difficult to spot the Big Bad of the story which still offered up plenty of twists on the silver platter of crime lit. The beauty of Bellairs is you can rely on him to provide a view, a portal in time if you will, of how mystery and crime used to be written when humanity didn’t need graphic blood and gore to be entertained. ( )