I felt like I shouldn't give feedback that is wholly negative but having tried to give it another go recently and then my wife trying, I feel like I need to tell the author not to have another go for his own good.

This mystery had a lot going for it, but never really took off the way I had hoped it would. The premise is brilliant, the characters are interesting—but it's good, not great, reading.

I so wanted to love this third book in the Inspector Lamb Mystery Series. The setting and time period — rural England during 1942 — drew me, but there were too many plot convolutions and undeveloped characters. 3 of 5 Stars

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. Opinions are mine. Pub Date 06 Nov 2018.
#HushedInDeath #NetGalley.

The third in this particular series, but the first I've read. I like British mysteries and police procedurals as well, so this ticked those two boxes. It was set in Hampshire (where I live) during WW II but there is only a little reference to it in respect of the year (1942), that there was an air raid over Southampton towards the end, and some references to ex-soldiers in a sanitorium and the main characters' roles in WWI.

It moved along quite steadily and was easy to engage with, although I found myself a little distracted by the writing at a couple of points. Towards the end, there was Lamb doing this, then what Rivers is thinking and planning out, then on to Wallace and back to Lamb, before whizzing off to the murderer's thoughts. It jarred me away from the main point (capture of murderer) and flow of the story, and the action because I had to pause momentarily to figure out what was going on. Convenient suspicions also arose which were...well, convenient, to the story, and ultimately led to yet another murderer.

But overall I enjoyed it. I wasn't wholly invested in the characters simply because I don't know them well, but it was easy enough to figure it all out and a pleasant enough way to spend a few hours on.

The third police procedural featuring Detective Chief Inspector Lamb opens in the Spring of 1942 when a shocking murder occurs on a once prominent country estate, at a grand manor named Ellicott House which is located in Marbury, Cheshire. The house now acts as a hospital for shell shocked officers who have been sent back from the front lines of the War in Europe which is still of course has three years still to run.

The gruesome murder occurs shocks the local population and DCI Lamb and his team are sent to investigate it. The murdered man Joseph Lee had been found floating face down in a pond. Lee was head gardener and a pretty nasty individual it appears from Lambs investigation. The deceased had a number of enemies in the local population but who had considered him dangerous enough to kill was difficult to determine.

DCI Lamb and his team of investigators, which includes his daughter Vera, study all the clues that are presented and look into all possible avenues. The murder seems to have echoes to an earlier murder in the past and Lamb is mystified even further when he discovers that one of his principal suspects committed suicide.

In this period before modern investigative techniques Lamb must discover the truth and find the murderer by interviewing all possible suspects and checking their stories out by all the means available to him.

The author of the DCI Thomas Lamb books, Stephen Kelly, is I was surprised to learn an award winning writer, reporter, editor and newspaper columnist. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and Baltimore Magazine. He lives in Columbia, Maryland, USA.

I was very impressed with this book and had no idea that the author was an American until after I finished the story. He writes as well as Charles Todd another of his countrymen and I enjoyed reading this book very much.

Strongly recommended..




Best wishes,

Terry
(To be published on eurocrime.co.uk in due course)

Hushed in Death opens very somberly. The Elton House’s gardener Joseph Lee is discovered floating in the pond, his body suspended like a “leaf caught in a current.” Detective Chief Inspector Lamb and his team arrive on the scene. Stephen Kelly captures the scene with deft precision.

Lamb stood by silently, taking in the scene—the pond, the surrounding woodland, the worn muddy path to Marbury, and the gray, ivy-covered estate house on the hill, surrounded by long-neglected grounds. It had rained the previous morning, but not since. Still, the late April air remained moist and chilled. The spot reminded Lamb of the vaguely eerie rural places in which the Thomas Hardy novels he’d been required to read as a schoolboy, had been set; places that always had seemed to him sodden with sorrow.

“Sodden with sorrow” captures the troubled mental state of the inhabitants of the formerly grand Elton House: it’s now a sanctuary, a sanitorium, “transformed into a hospital for “shell-shocked” officers sent back from the front lines.”

Detective Chief Inspector Lamb is an intriguing character. His life’s experiences, specifically, his time in the Somme trenches during World War I, influence and expand his understanding of the mysterious happenings at Elton House in the spring of 1942. In today’s parlance, Lamb had—and perhaps still has—PTSD, the shell-shock of earlier times. Dr. Hornby, who heads up the Elton House Sanatorium, challenges Lamb that he may have lingering “psychological effects of combat,” and then apologies for his inquisitiveness.

“No need to apologize,” Lamb said. Then the words escaped his mouth before he’d even had a chance to compose then: “Nightmares, mostly. Not as often as before, but they still come at times. And faces. I sometimes see faces and shapes. Faces and shapes of men who were lost.”

Another modern aspect of Hushed in Death is Vera Lamb’s struggles with her role. Her father privately acknowledges her skills: he knows his daughter is “spirited, confident, and brave.”

But she was merely his driver, and merely a young woman, an auxiliary constable who owed her job to the coming of the war and the resulting shortage of men and her father’s unfair intervention on her behalf…

It is highly unusual for a woman to be part of an investigative team, and Vera being his daughter raises questions of nepotism. Nonetheless, Vera’s observation skills are integral to the investigation. Lamb awkwardly finesses his fatherly and supervisory relationship with Vera. He senses his daughter wants to move on with her life: that she’s subconsciously readying herself to flee the nest. She’s no ordinary driver Lamb acknowledges. Ordinarily, his driver would wait for him in his car, but Lamb throws Vera a bone.

“If you get bored, you might have a look round the grounds,” he said. He touched Vera’s slender arm and said in a fatherly tone, “I’ll fetch you when we’re ready.”

Vera looked at her father. Lamb believed that she wanted to say something to him; her expression contained almost a quality of beseeching he thought. He waited several seconds for her to speak, but when Vera said nothing, he said, now in his Chief Inspector’s voice, “All right, then. Carry on.”

And carry on she does. Vera’s discovery of a “stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, wrapped in a plain brow, waxy paper with green lettering,” is a breakthrough for the investigation. Vera notes that “since the war began such American luxuries had all but disappeared in Britain,” so why is there a stick of American gum on the sodden ground of the Elton estate?

Mysteries that are set in stately homes have a special appeal. Storage rooms and ante-chambers and smuggler’s caves of an earlier time are often put to nefarious use decades later. Such is the case in Hushed in Death, the third in Stephen Kelly’s Inspector Lamb series. The mystery is rooted in the past of the estate and its current inhabitants.

The surface, Lamb thought. All of the bits and pieces—the secrets and lies—now were coming to the surface, like so much detritus breaking free from a sinking ship.

Readers will be caught up in the mystery of Elton House as Inspector Lamb weaves together the complicated strands of an often-surprising story to uncover the truth.

Another great Kelly mystery. True to his style, not necessarily unique but with interesting characters and a fun mystery.

I expected to like this. I wanted to like this. On the plus side, when the author is writing about the mystery, it's a decent enough cozy. On the down side, when he gets into the realm of the characters personal story ie Vera and David, it becomes overwrought and over written. He also doesn't have a very good grasp of the time period (WWII). The language is off a bit, and he repeatedly has the inspector's daughter question whether she should leave off working for her father and take her chances on the "call up". Women weren't called up in WWII. Lastly, if it takes a ten page data dump at the end of a book to explain what happened and why, there's something sadly lacking. In this case, it was a believable plot.

Inspector Lamb sets out to solve a murder. His daughter is a constable, serving as his driver, and helps the others with the investigation. The present murder seems connected to one the took place aboard a ship. The writing is weak. The sense of time and place lacks development. The character development is strong on most major characters but not quite to the level it needs to be on a few. I received an advance electronic galley from the publisher through NetGalley with the expectation of an honest review.

Hushed in Death is an old-fashioned country mystery featuring a bunch of likeable policeman and quirky villagers and of course a bunch of up-to-no-gooders, one or more of which might be involved not only with the murders but a range of other sinister onfoings. The whole setting is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and it happily plods along. We’ve got a few murders, a lot of detecting without the help of any technology, , and a lot of turns and coincidences, secrets from the past and family scandals that in the end stack up neatly to get the culprits what they deserve. I really enjoyed this one - it is exactly what it says on the tin, maybe not the most original or shocking of all murder mysteries out there, but a comfortable and entertaining read. After a couple of emotionally very draining books I’ve read recently I was in the mood for something light and easy and this was the perfect palate cleanser. It was the first DI Lamb book I picked up, but I shall certainly get the others now.

This review will also be shared on amazon.uk when the book has been published.

Slightly convoluted, unlikely coincidences and too little character depth.

The crime that starts us off brings together a cast of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie novel, with much overlapping of history and motive. Still, the police officer in charge does his best and unravels a twisted tale of jealousy and greed - two classic motives for murder of course. It unravels at a decent pace and there is some character development of people i assume we will see again, but i am not itching to get to the next one.