The Postscript Murders   by Elly Griffiths

A fast-moving, easy-to-read who-dunnit: gentle entertainment. It doesn’t quite break the fourth wall but lives very close to it, e.g., “A pretty memorable few days in anyone’s book, even one written by a crime writer.”

In fact, as a book about a crime-writing author, their associates and the publishing industry in general, taking place in the actual author’s home town and at a writers’ conference in Aberdeen which the author admits is based on a real event, it is a very unimaginative book. It contains some jarring time-line handling (more below) which initially comes across as a mistake, and overall starts out feeling somewhat low-effort. The chapters all amusingly, and distractingly, have sub-titles which are clearly the authorʼs pace notes. That the book might be aimed at a low-effort readership isn’t helped by the fact that one of the main protagonists is an ex-monk called Benedict, of all things.

The author does not deal with parallel plot lines very well at all, following one and then the other, across chapter boundaries, and then bringing them together by repeating a sentence: very jarring. The first time I read this I thought that the author had simply made a mistake, losing the plot and accidentally repeating herself.

The book opens up in the middle section, however, and settles into a gentle gait, where a shift to a new location removes the distractions of home and lets the characters function towards the plot. The strength of the book is by far in the plotting, which is very clean, suitably complicated without becoming unfollowable, and does not appear to have any holes in it, although characters do have a habit of popping up out of nowhere.

The ending is nicely rounded and does a good job of tying everything up over an extended discourse, though it transpires that there were two murderers and both jumped up out of nowhere (as well as Natalka’s brother). There is a lot of this Jack-in-a-box stuff.

While the overall plotting is very good, one gets no sense of connection with the characters. They are scantly described, and their dialogue does not exude the voices of the characters. I thought initially that Benedict and Natalka were a generation apart (early 50s versus late 20s, with Edwin late 70s and PC Naur mid-30s), so was quite surprised when they had sex and became a couple. There had been descriptive hints (Benedict shaking chocolate hearts onto cappuccinos), but nothing on an eye-contact level. (The ages are given explicitly in the book, but I glanced over them on first reading.) They fell in love when he lunged between Natalka and a gunman.

Similarly to the characterization, the environment does not really come through the words of this book, again being scantily described and not really participating in the story afterwards.

An author dies, and after a while it is considered suspicious, and then confounded by the violent death of another author living nearby. The suspect goes to a conference in Aberdeen, and three intrepid, losely connected people decide to pursue. Another death takes place in Aberdeen. When they all get back home, the clues start to drop...

The clue is ‘in’ the book which the first victim left: a bookmark with a picture of St Patrick points to Patricia! Nah! In the first place it is difficult to understand why the casualty would have been so obtuse in leaving clues about her murderer: if she wanted her found after her death, the clues would have been much more obvious.

The first murderer is revealed when she appears on CCTV with the murder weapon (gun) in her hand, some weeks after the event when a neighbour--very conveniently--returns home from an extended holiday (it is a very up-market neighbourhood).

The second murderer is exposed based on evidence which also suddenly pops up, and I genuinely had no idea who she was. Of course, she was introduced earlier in the book and then ignored, as murder-mystery plots are apt to do.