When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week” in England’s Peak District: a whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself—and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.

Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime” and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling—or something more—with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake murder may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.

‘Welcome To Murder Week’ was well-written, well-informed, well-narrated, lightly humorous, steeped in Golden Age Mystery references and had an engaging main character. 

I liked the ‘American in England for the first time’ tropes that were played out. The references to food taken for granted by the English but strange to Americans were fun. Who knew that the humble sausage roll would be worthy of comment? 

I admired the twist of having the central character, Cath, uninterested in and uninformed about crime solving and puzzled about why anyone would holiday in grey, rainy England when they could be in Greece looking out at the wine dark sea and then surrounding her crime fiction fans and Anglophiles of the kind who want to visit England because they love Austen, the Brontes and Midsummer Murders. Having Cath as an outsider made her easier to engage with and made me more empathetic towards the void she felt had been created by her mother’s frequent, lengthy and voluntary absences from Cath’s life.

So why did I set it aside at 33%?
.
Partly, it was because I thought the pace was too slow. That may have been down to my impatience. After all, the first third of the book was about introducing the main character and setting up the situation, BUT, I was a third of the way through, and there was neither murder nor mystery to engage with. I was getting bored. 

I almost continued because, just when I was sure that the mystery was going to be too cosy to keep me awake, I got a hint that Cath’s recently deceased mother had been pursuing a personal quest for something in the English Peak District, and the quest may have been the real reason she set up this uncharacteristic mother and daughter trip. That intrigued me, and it looked like it would give the story another layer, so I read another chapter. 

Then the plot took a turn off the mystery highway into the winding lanes of romance. I’m sure it would have been a well-written romance and that it would all have been tied back to a murder and Cath’s Mother’s quest, but that is so much not my kind of thing that I felt weary just thinking about it, so I set the book aside.

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘Welcome to Murder Week’. Carlotta Brentan did a good job with the narration, but wasn’t quite up to the challenge of producing the many English accents required by the text. I think it would have been better to use an English narrator and get them to cover the small number of American accents needed. If you’re not British, the accents are unlikely to bother you, and everything else about the narration works. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of Carlotta Brentan’s performance.

---