I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This started put well for me: I like an Oxford setting, and I thought the character of the protagonist Eve was well-drawn and fully rounded. She had actual friends, an interesting job, a relationship with her daughter, feminist principles, and persevered in taking public transport wherever she went. But... then, instead of doing her job (which had initially been to finish off and get ready for publication a book by a sort of Jordan Peterson type, the recently dead David Morrow, and which then morphed into discovering if he had indeed written a word of the book before his death) she decides there is something off about Morrow's death and that it is her responsibility to get to the bottom of things. To this end she travels all around England and to France, stirring things up with all Morrow's family and contacts, keeping secrets and spilling secrets and suspecting everyone of nebulous things.

Even setting aside the strangeness of what she is doing, at about the 50% mark the narrative got really bogged down. Eve would go on a journey and thrash things out in her own mind and then she would do it again, and then again and so on. The ending was an anticlimax and also the sort of ending of which I disapprove. A pity, as I liked the writing and I liked Eve.

I thought there was a lot of potential for this book but it fell short for me. I loved the idea of the MC, a scholar who has chosen to live a bit off the social grid, but found her at times to be so unaware of the world it felt unrealistic. As she tries to find the lost manuscript of a universally disliked colleague, I found myself simply not caring at some points.

I did like many of the secondary characters and wish there was a bit more of them in the story.

Dr. Eve Brook is hired to finish a biography by author/right-wing media personality David Morrow who died . . . or was he murdered? Eve searches for the unfinished manuscript, the secrets of Morrow's life, and the answer to whether he was murdered. "Death of an Englishman" has the bones of an interesting book, but I found myself skimming through long passages and chapters filled with Eve's musings on what had possibly happened, the nature of biography and memory, and the motivations of the various suspects and family members. Thank you to NetGalley and the Book Guild for the eARC.

I was so interested in the description of this book and I was excited to wander around Oxford on this journey but I just could not get over all the woke vs. anti-woke pandering. Not only that, but it was a chore to read. The writing was hard to engage in.

While I did finish this book, it felt like an assignment.

Thank you NetGalley and The Book Guild for the ARC. All opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

This was a fun mystery novel, and I enjoyed it a lot. I am looking forward to reading more by this author.

I should have DNF'd. This flat piece of prose hammers on about important things that are not fully relevant to the story. It's a mystery and it take over half the book to get to the crux of the point. Also, I know it's on the cover, "an Oxford mystery," yet so many of the readers are not of the Oxfordian culture and will have to break their reading to look-up terms and colloquialisms that are not natural to them, and have no further context clues to aid the aforementioned readers.

Death Of An Englishman by Anna Beer follows Oxford’s Eve Brook on a quest for a valuable manuscript. Set against the backdrop of Oxford’s colleges Eve’s quest turns into a hunt for the author’s killer. Everyone Eve meets seems to have something to hide and a reason to want the author, David Morrow, dead.
This book sounded so good and cozy, set against the background of Oxford’s Colleges. The overall plot was good, however you had to decipher a lot of discombobulated text in order to get to it. The author had too many things trying to happen at once; a historical story, the plot, character development and analysis of the events and characters. This caused the story to be very confusing at times. It also didn’t give enough room for anything to develop enough to have an impact. I really feel like this book could have been a success if the author had stuck to the plot and character development.
Thank you The Book Guild Ltd. for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

David Morrow, a white man that no one liked, has died at Oxford. He’s supposed to have left behind a manuscript that no one really wants to read. Eve Brook is asked to find the manuscript. As she looks deeper into finding it, and why no one really wants it, including herself, she begins to think his death has a lot of unanswered questions.
Eve is a singular woman, very disconnected from people. Through her investigations she finds she likes making connections and must try to dig her head out of ancient historical thoughts in order to make her investigation make sense.
It was an interesting book with some really good parts, but sometimes I lost the thread.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Book Guild for this DRC.
#DeathofanEnglishman #NetGalley

The first in what seems to be maybe a new cozy series follows Eve as she is hired to complete the book of a controversial Oxford writer. It seems like many people might have wanted him dead.

I wanted to like this as I love cozies so much! But it felt overly written for a cozy - like it was trying to be more serious fiction almost? I'm not sure and maybe it was just me. But the writing style didn't really match the desired audience.

Book doctor Eve suspects murder after the death of a controversial Oxford don and the disappearance of his manuscript.

This book is written in a literary style, which is unexpected for a murder mystery. The tone is bleak—not atmospheric, just dull and lifeless. The pace is excruciatingly slow. A lot of time is spent on trains moving from place to place, rather than dramatizing the investigation. Murder isn’t really suspected until the second half of the book—the first half is the search for the manuscript.

Mostly, the book seems like a vehicle for espousing the author’s political views. Even a reader who agrees with those views is likely to find their expression inept. The characters are stereotypes, the emotion utterly lacking, the plot thin, the resolution unsatisfying. Fortunately, the book is relatively short.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This is a cozy mystery set in and around Oxford, investigating the death of a professor who was writing an anti-woke book. The setting and topic appealed to me, but unfortunately, this was a huge miss for me for many reasons.

Most importantly, the writing in this book is not good. It's choppy to the point of incoherence, with the author jumping from one thought to the next without any kind of transition or logic. Sentences are often too long and incredibly convoluted, with lots of parentheses and dashes to insert or add information. There are even instances where the author uses parentheses and dashes in the same sentence, creating a paragraph-long nearly indecipherable word soup. On top of that, many words and phrases are used incorrectly. The dialogue is clunky. The inner monologue of the main character feels unnatural. Overall, the writing is so poor that it made it impossible for me to feel immersed in the story at any point.

Almost all of it is also telling rather than showing. The first chapter, for example, is a dense and inelegant infodump, with an enormous amount of names and backstories being thrown at the reader in a short amount of time. The rest of the book isn't much better. We are constantly told things about Eve and other characters, but we rarely actually see those things manifest in the story.

My last complaint is the blatant soapboxing. The author beats you over the head with her messaging over and over again. The worst thing is that I actually agree with everything the author is trying to communicate (about feminism, abuse of power, anti-wokeness, etc.), but it was done in such an unsubtle way that I only felt annoyed. Many of the statements were incredibly basic, like telling the reader that women have been oppressed by men for millennia, without adding anything new or any fresh insight. Moreover, I read fiction in order to see this kind of commentary illustrated in the narrative, not given as a lecture.

Two stars because I appreciate the author's intention for this book. Sadly, I did not enjoy the execution. However, if the summary appeals to you, by all means check it out for yourself.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest opinion.

A decidedly underwhelming read. I was hoping for an intelligently conceived plot, worked around sharply imagined characters and settings, and realized in distinctive and well-wrought prose. After all, the author is a university lecturer in English literature with a published monograph on Milton.

Instead I labored through a threadbare story involving the missing final manuscript of a dead white male (with all the unsavory associations of that term that the highly woke and progressive author is able to inflict on him). The suspects are initially presented as feisty and artsy women, with the obligatory gay couple thrown in to round out the stereotypes. By the end, of course, all liberal pieties will be honored and all fragile sensibilities soothed.

Beer evidently thinks that the way to the riches of bestsellerdom is to condescend to the unwashed by writing in flowing cliches. Nothing original here, no arresting phrases nor interesting diction. The reader is further disrespected by the author's occasional aggressive flashes of her own political agenda and woke attitudes. (Poor Jordan Peterson is name-checked.)

To adopt the author's own nakedly identitarian stance: if you are a college-educated woman of politically progressive inclinations, pleased to be catered to by a credentialled superior, this book will flatter you. If you are a thinking male (or, actually, person) who hopes for literary qualities and a clever plot from even genre-literature, this is not for you.

ARC provided by the publisher and Netgalley.

3.75 stars

An intelligent and thoughtful mystery, featuring Dr. Eve Brook, an academic writer who has been hired to finish a manuscript by a recently deceased writer. But nothing is simple in this plot. As it turns out, no one knows where the manuscript is, or if it even exists. And the dead author was a controversial figure, an uber conservative anti woke zealot who may or may not have died of natural causes.

Eve is intrigued. She is a bit of a loner and likes to have things neatly finished up. So she begins investigating, supposedly to find the manuscript, but along the way she talks to the victim's wife, son, long lost daughter, colleagues and doctor. More and more questions arise. Who would have wanted him dead?

Eve is a quirky character who mostly keeps to herself but somehow is pretty skilled at drawing information out in interviews. There lots of surprises and Eve's original task shifts into something altogether different as she follows the trail to the end. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

We meet Eve on a train platform, which is just where she likes to be. She's thinking about how she'd rather be catching a train in a different location where it's not the tail end of winter, but maybe this journey will help her get there. She's on her way to meet a publisher so she can embark on a new project. Eve is a ghostwriter of sorts--her current project is all about pork. That is, she trying to make readable an autobiography of a rich guy who made his money from pork. This new project promises to be more interesting and perhaps lucrative enough to pay for a train trip in a sunny, warm location. She's been asked to do finish up a book by an infamous guy, recently deceased, who made his name by spewing his racist, misogynist ideas all over the place. His book--a diatribe against 'woke'-- is nearing the publication date. There's a problem though. The publisher and the literary executor don't actually have the manuscript. They want Eve to find it, polish it up, and get it back to them. Things get weird pretty quickly, though, and nothing is as straightforward as she thought it would be. Where is the manuscript? And did this guy really die of natural causes? Eve won't stop until she gets the answers she's looking for.

When I saw the description of this book, I was intrigued. When I read the book, I was delighted. It's a wonderful, unique, kind of quirky, cozy mystery. Eve is a woman who loves trains, travel, notebooks, and words. She's smart, compassionate, and self-aware. She's a vegetarian who bicycles, walks, and uses public transport instead of owning a car. She's built a life for herself on her own terms. I quite enjoyed spending time with her. The mystery aspect of the book was well done and unusual in the cozy genre in the sense that the primary mystery is about the book and the deceased person and how he met his end is somewhat secondary to that. I enjoyed the literary aspect of the plot and how the various people Eve meets in the course of her investigation fit into into the web of relationships around this odious individual. The setting has a bit of a traditional mystery vibe, but it captures the current moment exceptionally well. I'm so glad I discovered this book. The description mentions that Eve is embarking on her first mystery, so I hope that means there will be a second mystery at some point. If there is, I'll snap it up.