Murder in Steeple Martin by Lesley Cookman

Murder in Steeple Martin

Review of the novel Murder in Steeple Martin by Lesley Cookman.

Published by Accent Press Ltd in 2012.

Cost: £7.99

ISBN 978-1-908-91707-2 (Paperback)

This is the first book of the series that has Libby Sarjeant as the lead character; currently there are 14 book in the series.

Libby Sarjeant lives in a small village in Kent called Steeple Martin. She is an actress and an artist and is directing a play called the The Hop Pickers by a local writer to be put on in an Oast House that has been turned into a theatre in the village where she lives. At the front of the book there is a map of the village; helpful as the characters do a lot of walking between locations; (It’s a shame that you have to keep turning the page around to read the street and building names.).

The play has been written by Libby’s friend Peter and is based on a real events associated with his family. But when the disappearance and murder of one of the cast members, makes everything much more serious, and past history seems to be coming to the fore. Libby gets curious and decides to look further into the accidents surrounding the play and the possibility of a link with the murder.

The story has strong links with the past and Cookman has a number of chapters where the story reverts to the lives of the hop pickers. The change is not obvious and when reading these chapters, I had to stop and ask myself what had happened to the story, as the children in these chapters are still alive as adults in the main story and the use of the names was confusing. I am not a lover of stories that revert to historical moments in time and I do not see why Cookman felt she needed to introduce this aspect into the story, unless she felt the reader needed to learn more about the script of play being rehearsed and later performed at the theatre.

Unlike the majority of today’s fiction, the murders and attacks are not too gory nor described in great detail, which may appeal to the reader of this book, but it does cause a problem for Libby, as no one investigating the murder discusses how the victim dies. Libby’s main focus is the accidents, and these involve long conversations with the other characters, and as a result, the story is rather slow moving. At the start of the book Cookman lists most of the characters the reader can expect to learn about in the story and their relationships to other characters. We learn of Sidney, Libby’s cat that is quite a character in his own right, with food being his main priority. Well into the book a new character is introduced; Fran Castle, and it’s the link between Fran and Libby that is at the heart of the story, as Fran has intuition like moments that help them understand the accidents and lead them to the murderer.

There were times when I wanted to put the book down, but as I had nothing else to read, it just kept me interested enough to read to the end. The characters spend a lot of time at a local eatery called The Pink Geranium, owned by Perter and Harry, but it was the spelling of the word ‘caff’ that did not appeal to me. I wonder if Cookman was trying to get the sense of local inflection across to her reader and as it grated on me this was unsuccessful; better to use the written word Café without the accent.

For once this is a story where the amateur detectives do not get too involved in the crime solving, letting the local police do their job, while at the same time hinting that solving a crime is not easy. We are introduced to the two local police officers that investigate the murder behind the scenes and when they come to the fore their manner is quite forceful and very police like, suggesting that Libby should leave the crime solving to them, they come across as very believable.

I do have a concern about the ability of Cookman to describe her characters so that the reader can identify with them and as I reflect on this story, I’m still not sure if I could describe the main character, Libby Sarjeant. She is defined as small and whenever she leaves her house she wears a cape; we know she is in her fifties, a divorcee, but I felt that I was looking at a different Libby, depending on where I was in the story.

For this story to be a real murder mystery there should have been some acceptable red herrings in the tale, but I seemed to have missed them, it was all very obvious from the start, and following the rule of the Detection Club, the murderer was identified early on, for which I give credit to Lesley Cookman.

In conclusion, I felt that as a first story based on Libby Sarjeant, it was a good novel, but I would hope that the next in the series developed the character, and as there are 14 stories to date, I must assume that this has happened. I would also hope that the location of the story moves out of the village of Steeple Martin and we learn about incidents that take place in other villages. I would read the next in the series, hoping the characters would develop along with the investigation skills of Libby and Fran. Rating: 3 stars.

Dr James Sheppard

10 March 2015