Lesley Cookman

Helpfully at the beginning of this novel there is a Who's Who in the Libby Sarjeant series. I did end up using it a few times to get relationships between people sorted out. There are a number of occasional references to events that Libby and her friends have been involved in in previous titles.

I think I may need to add the village of Steeple Martin to my list of places not to visit, although the village itself sounds pretty interesting. (If you remember others include St. Mary Mead, and anything including the word Midsommer.)

The action of the novel centres around a quickly written play about the life of St. Eldreda to be accompanied by the display of a reliquary which contains her finger bone. Of course we are expecting a murder because of the title of the novel, but the identity of the victim comes as a surprise to all. Libby engages a researcher to trace the descendants of the family whom the reliquary has belonged to over the centuries. The results of this research provides a lot of surprises.

This is a real cozy, lots of characters to sort out, and red herrings do abound. Libby has a good working relationship with a local police DCI because she has been involved in a number of earlier cases. There is probably a good argument for getting into this series at the very beginning, so you have the build up of character information that will result from that.… (altro)

I found this first installment in British author Lesley Cookman's "Libby Sarjeant" series to be nicely enjoyable. I guess it's what's known as a "cosy." Former professional actress Libby Sarjeant, now middle-aged, has become involved with amateur theater and she comes to the village of Steeple Martin, in Kent, to direct a new play in the village's new theater. The play has been written by a member of one of the village's leading families, and it deals with a rather dark episode a generation back in the family's history. As this is a murder mystery, naturally there is, quite soon, a murder. In the meantime, further details about the historical incident in question begin to slowly leak out. And so forth. The mystery, I thought, was well done and the telling of the back-story particularly effective and restrained. There were a lot of characters and names presented in a hurry, and it took me some time to sort everything, and everyone, out. I just did what I usually do in such instances, which is to go with the flow and hope everything sorts itself out eventually. And eventually it all became mostly clear to me. The important characters were relatively believable, with Sarjeant's character nicely non-cliche-ridden. While it's not the most compelling series I've ever started, I will certainly be reading the next few series entries to see how Cookman developed the Sarjeant character.… (altro)

2013
Wow. I'm so surprised that someone rated this book highly. I basically gave the author one star for having the gumption to write a book and one for, well, I guess because I didn't want to be so cruel as to only give it one star.

Specifically, it was very difficult to keep track of the players, even with a cheat sheet at the very beginning. A better writer, or a writer with more experience, would have WRITTEN the relationships in a stronger fashion so that a key wouldn't have been necessary.

Additionally, a couple of--it turned out--key characters were hardly mentioned until the end.

Finally, bringing a psychic in on the action...really?

Don't waste your money. It's really not worth reading.

2015
I found it much better the second time around. Actually, I read it again because I couldn't remember a thing about it...but then it turns out I could remember enough! My chief complaint the first time was the complicated story line with family falling off every branch of the tree. This time around I didn't worry so much about it. So I am now increasing the rating to 2.5 stars.

Some plots just need to age....… (altro)