Mount TBR #34

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Murder Fantastical – Patricia Moyes

The members of the Manciple family are considered eccentric because they are, in the best tradition of English oddness. The head of the family is an ex-soldier who is both a crack marksman and a pacifist. The dotty old aunt is interested in supernatural topics such as tabbies astrally projecting themselves. Brothers to the head are a crossword puzzle-obsessed bishop who plays the clarinet (badly) and a physicist with Newt Scamander social skills. A sister-in-law starts a notebook for wildflower collecting to improve the botanizing skills of our series hero Henry Tibbett, Chief Inspector for Scotland Yard.

But the residents of the English village where the family has lived for generations are used to dotty gentry. Off their dots, but our own, after all. Furthermore, it stands to reason for these sturdy country folk that when the newly rich ad unlikable London bookie Raymond Mason is found shot dead in the driveway to the Munciple’s run-down estate that the culprit is not one of the Manciples.

Chief Inspector Tibbett, however, has an unenviable task: he has to take the Manciples, whom he takes to, very seriously as suspect. They are characters of interest because the murder victim wanted to buy their estate very badly indeed. Tibbet wonders why he was so hell-bent on purchasing an estate that would take a fortune to rehab.

I highly recommend this mystery. It combines an interesting plot and the off-kilter humor comes out of the deft characterization. The wacky incidents are not too wacky – Moyes isn’t Craig Rice. For those that like shout-outs to the classic age of whodunnits, there is even an ingenious engine of death that would probably never come off in real life. Thank heaven for mysteries!