"Wicked Autumn" by G.M. Malliet: Book Review

"Wicked Autumn" by G.M. Malliet
Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, 297 pp., $23.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Max Tudor isn't the first or last literary cleric to cross over into a murder investigation, but he's probably the most qualified of the lot preceding him, having been an MI5 (British Intelligence) agent.

An epiphany-- literal and figurative-- has led him to the Church of England; more specifically, to St. Edwold's Church in Nether Monkslip, near the English Channel in the southwest of England.

The fictitious Nether Monkslip is one of those picture-book/storybook villages that has attracted plenty of transplants from all over the Kingdom, but particularly from London. These talented, creative newcomers have chosen the hills and dales, the peace and quiet, for their respective reasons, as has the Reverend Tudor.

As there isn't much local entertainment-- aside from gossip, and great dollops of it, at the pub and tea shop-- most of the town's women belong to the local chapter of the Women's Institute (WI), which is in high gear and drama for the annual Harvest Fayre, with proceeds to benefit the repair of the leaky roof on St. Edwold's.

Nine-tenths of the drama is provoked by the Town Termagant, the Village Virago, one Wanda Batton-Smythe, who's going to exit the stage of Nether Monkslip with as much theatricality as she has foisted upon it.

Alas, Reverend Tudor: He chose to live in Nether Monkslip in order to escape the mayhem and murder of MI5 ops.

What for it: Let the interrogation begin.

Max, at the request of the Detective Inspector in charge of the case, begins putting some hard questions to his parishioners: Life-and-death questions relating not to their own souls, but to the not-so-dearly-departed one of Mrs. Batton-Smythe.

Well, the Good Padre cannot abide a murderer singing "All Things Bright and Beautiful" in the fifth pew, center aisle.

If the above proceedings sound traditional, it's because they by-and-large are. However, this isn't exactly what one would term a cozy mystery. After all, the author drops the F-bomb on that notion.

What author G.M. Malliet has done is to put a 21st-century spin on the traitional British village mystery. Max's participation in the investigation seems natural, given his background and his concern for the safety and welfare of his parishioners.

He's also a chestnut (or two) from British drama and literature: The handsome vicar (doesn't matter whether he's married or not, though Max has never been) who has many of the female (and probably a few of the male) hearts a-flutter.

He serves as a star around which many of the villagers orbit, and they are a well-characterized group indeed, from the Vicar's thoroughly incompetent maid (and her son and precocious daughter), to the New Age emporium's be-robed proprietress, to the harried tea-shop owner with the no-account son.

The setting, the characters, and particularly the author's generous spread of wry humor will be most sufficient to entice the reader toward another visit to Nether Monkslip.

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