When former serial killer Carol takes her place in a luxury retirement home, she begins to find her feet with a small new group of friends. If she can only keep her past hidden, maybe she has a chance at happiness.
That’s when she discovers that, absurdly, every other one of Sheldon Oaks’ residents was involved in the law somehow. It’s not long before her true identity is leaked, and when a former police commissioner resident is murdered, naturally all eyes turn to her…
Now she must solve the case to prove her innocence – just as her new friends start their own investigations into whether there is more than one killer at Sheldon Oaks.
Like a sponge cake made with margarine instead of butter, this novel promised more than it delivered. I was very disappointed.
The writing was ok. The setup was interesting. The murder mystery was fairly solid. It was the kind of thing a smart director with a strong cast could turn into decent television.
Yet, for me, this book failed.
The humour, such as it was, fell flat. It was mostly observational stuff, the sort of thing Richard Osman does well, but here it was done with a sneer rather than a smile.
I didn’t believe in the characters as individuals or in the friendship that sprang up between them for no greater reason than accidental propinquity. The ex-policeman was Too Stupid to Live, and the two women were too naive for their supposed backgrounds. One of them had been the Home Secretary for goodness sake, the fourth most senior member of the British government, and was still a KC, one of the most senior lawyers in the country and yet she was the one who seemed to struggle to keep up. The other was an ex-medical examiner who seemed to have lost whatever drive had gotten her the job. The most disappointing character was Carol, the convicted serial killer. She was a sketch rather than a portrait and one done with an indecisive hand. All of them came across as concepts necessary to the rather complicated plot rather than people who I’d recognised from real life.
I can see that this was meant to be a slightly edgy black comedy rather than a police procedural, but if you’re going to have a DS and a DCI as central characters in the plot, then they should at least look like they’re familiar with PACE and the police code of conduct. The DCI in this was presented like someone halfway between a Keystone Cop and a member of the Sweeney. His rank also seemed too senior for the circumstances. I’d have expected a suspicious death to merit a DS and a DI at most. At one point, the DCI and the DS make an arrest and run an interrogation. They ignore PACE rules for interrogation. They make no offer of legal representation. They have no evidence that would provide the basis for a charge that the CPS would allow to go to trial. Yes, I know it’s a comedy, but this level of detachment from reality undermined the story and served no purpose.
The murder plot was presented with a little too much awareness of being a murder plot. It seemed to me that Fergus Craig was disdaining the genre he’d chosen to write in and the apparently too-easily-satisfied expectations of the people who read it.
I stayed with the book to the end. hoping that it would get better. It didn’t. It just got harder and harder to believe in,
It seemed to me that Fergus Craig had put no energy into making the people or the situation real. Instead, he’d put together a pastiche of The Thursday Murder Club, substituting psychopathy and satire for friendship and empathy.
