Tony R Cox is an ex-provincial UK journalist. The Simon Jardine series is based on his memories of the early 70s - the time of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll - when reporters relied on word of mouth and there was no internet, no mobile phones, not even a fax machine.
Crime in a cosy cottage, in one of the UJK’s most loved and well-known seaside tourist hotspots. A fire warms the soul as it nears Christmas for characters with grief in their hearts and visions of love and peace.
Shattered by the discovery of the body of a young man.
This author hits all the bases for a cosy crime mystery and offers absorbing descriptions of place, time and people that ensures the flow is sometimes gentle, rarely frenetic, and always intriguing.
Successful solicitor Merrin McKenzie has lost her police inspector husband to murder, has a daughter at Oxford University, and up-sticks from a secure life in Bristol to a tiny cottage in St. Ives, her Cornish home town. She’s inveigled into helping a friend clean their holiday cottages and on her first day discovers the body of a man, carefully laid out in a bed, as if at peace.
His identity is a mystery. There are no fingerprint records, nor DNA matches. Merrin – ‘my lovely’ and ‘maid’ to the very much native, roundly stout, police sergeant – gets involved. It’s a murder and there are more to follow along in this intricately woven, comfortably paced, plot that touches so many unsettling crimes, each of which has to be solved and justice meted out.
The author has a deep feel for Cornwall’s traditional way of life, including and especially when the million tourists have gone back to their big cities after the sun has set for oncoming winter. She has a deft touch with the narrative, and even introduces laugh-out-loud comedy without stilting the plot.
This book is the start of a series. The array of intriguing characters introduced, from emotionally confused police to stressed-out restaurant owners, sets the scene for more crime and mysteries to be investigated, and villains locked away. As characters state: such a rash of deaths in St Ives is unusual and doesn’t fit the town’s image. This series could well change that.
