ENGLAND, 1930. Grieving widows are a familiar sight on London’s Necropolis Railway. So when an elegant young woman in a black veil boards the funeral train, nobody guesses her true purpose.

But Rachel Savernake is not one of the mourners. She hopes to save a life – the life of a man who is supposed to be cold in the grave. But then a suspicious death on the railway track spurs her on to investigate a sequence of baffling mysteries: a death in a blazing car; a killing in a seaside bungalow; a tragic drowning in a frozen lake. Rachel believes that the cases are connected – but what possible link can there be?

Rich, ruthless and obsessed with her own dark notions of justice, she will not rest until she has discovered the truth. To find the answers to her questions she joins a house party on the eerie and remote North Yorkshire coast at Mortmain Hall, an estate. Her inquiries are helped – and sometimes hindered – by the impetuous young journalist Jacob Flint and an eccentric female criminologist with a dangerous fascination with perfect crimes…

What a disappointing read! I’m kicking myself for not having set this aside at 50% when I knew it wasn’t working for me. It would have saved me another five hours of listening to a book that felt like eating a supermarket ready meal, it filled me up but it failed to excite me or energise me and left me wishing I’d eaten something else. I won’t be adding ‘Blackstone Fell‘, the third book in the series, to my TBR pile.

‘Mortmain Hall‘ is the second book in the Rachel Savernake series. I enjoyed the first book. ‘Gallows Court‘. I was looking forward to spending more time in Rachel Savernake’s world. Sadly, although ‘Mortmain Hall‘ had many of the same ingredients as ‘Gallows Court‘ but the balance was off and the flavour was lost.

Two things spoiled my enjoyment of ‘Mortmain Hall’. The first thing that marred my enjoyment was that the narrative died under the weight of the complex but not compelling plot. So much time was spent on exposition that I felt like I was being fed legal briefs so that I could work out who did what to whom and why. The ideas in the plot were fine. All the pieces were intricately connected and how they were connected didn’t become clear until almost the end of the novel. I’d normally admire that but this time I just found it frustrating. Sticking with the food analogies, this was a cake that didn’t rise. The pace of the exposition was too slow and had little or no emotional impact. I felt like I was being invited to solve a crossword or complete a jigsaw puzzle rather than immerse myself in a thriller.

The second thing that got in my way was that I struggled to care about any of the characters. For the first half of the book, I couldn’t figure out why Rachel Savernake was so engaged in solving this puzzle. In ‘the first ‘Gallows Court‘, Rachel’s involvement was personal. I could almost taste her need for revenge. That was absent the second ‘Mortmain Hall‘. By the end of the book, I’d understood that Savernake was someone I had little sympath for: a rich, bored hobbyist who was willing to mess with the lives of the people around her not to seek justice or even vengeance but purely to satisfy her curiosity.

I quite liked the newspaperman Jacob Flint in ‘Gallows Court’. I saw him as someone who was “… apart from his insatiable curiosity, an ordinary sort of man, still capable of empathy and kindness and still vulnerable enough to be shaken by violence and death when he encountered it. Jacob kept the story human and real and provided a filter for assessing Rachel Savernake.” Jacob’s were some of the best scenes in ‘Mortmain Hall‘ yet I found myself becoming impatient with his naivety and his inability not just to see the big picture to remember that there was one. I was put off by how shocked he was by the denizens of the demimonde, how easily he was deceived and how unthinkingly he ran along the path that Rachel Savernake set him on.

When I look back on the book, I can see that it ought to have been more fun. It has the Necropolis Railway Company, a man-eating lion, a spooky old house by the sea, a storm that turns into a natural disaster, a ruthless retired English Army officer with a metal claw where his hand should be and it tells the story of five murders.

So why wasn’t it fun? I’ve tried to answer that by sharing below the notes I made as I read.

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50%

This isn’t up to the first book’s standard. The narrative plods along, almost staggering under the plot’s weight. 

So far, very little has happened. Most of the time has been spent on effortful exposition of the various, I assume linked, cold cases. 

The narrator, Leighton Pugh, is doing his best but he’s not holding my attention. I’ve twice had to go back over sections because my attention wandered onto a more interesting line of thought.

58%

Well, something finally happened and quite a dramatic something. Even so, the pace still feels glacial.

I don’t get the fascination with Jacob Flint. He’s boring and incredibly naive. His role seems to be to make the poor decision the plot depends on. I’d rather the focus was on Rachel Savernake. I have no idea why she is doing what she’s doing.

It jars with me that the gay/bi people in the story are shown as either weak, decadent or dangerous. I know that the laws of the time forced them into an unsafe demimonde but the way the people are drawn feels off.

80%

I’m going to finish this because I’m eight hours into a ten-hour novel but it’s really not gripping me. It should be exciting. Blood is being split. There’s even a death by lion but, for me at least, there’s no emotional involvement.

100%

I wish I’d set this aside at 50%. Rachel Savernake’s big reveal had all the drama of an after-lunch PowerPoint presentation. No wonder Martin Edwards decided to add a big storm to make things exciting.

Now I know how everything works, I can admire the design of the puzzle and the placement of the clues but it wasn’t a puzzle I believed in or cared about.