Tom Spencer’s hilarious mystery about a contrary, gin-soaked, slightly oblivious archivist at a private library whose discovery of a lost work by a Golden Age author blows up in her face is a real find. You’ve never met a less likable—or funnier—would-be sleuth than Agatha Dorn: “When I’ve had a couple of gins-and-water, I like to think I resemble a taller, bonier Fiona Shaw. When I’m hideously sober, as I am now, I have a less flattering opinion of my appearance.” Reviled and canceled once the book is revealed to be a fake, Agatha begins to wonder if the recent death of her ex-girlfriend wasn’t natural after all, and might be connected to the bogus manuscript. She tries to get to the bottom of the deception, none too expertly, while staving off her terror of the titular childhood bogeyman. Agatha is like a P. G. Wodehouse character dipped in acid, a confirmed misanthrope who can’t get out of her own way. I hope Spencer will revisit her soonest.
This book has a big advantage going in: its author created and wrote every episode of the great British TV series Broadchurch. Chris Chibnall applies his considerable skills to this complex examination of another coastal English village rocked by a murder. The victim’s body has been bizarrely staged in death, and when he’s identified as the man who runs the popular White Hart pub, the villagers are flummoxed. The police detectives assigned to the case have their work cut out for them with uncooperative locals and a victim whose congenial public face concealed a troubled life. Death at the White Hart is a deft, probing police procedural that works on its own terms—no Broadchurchcomparisons necessary.
