Deadly Company - Ann Granger

I can’t remember if I’ve ever blogged about Ann Granger's Mitchell and Markby books before. In the first one – still my favourite really, although I’ve not reread it in at least 15 years, and suspect I may find it weaker now than I did – Meredith Mitchell, foreign office consul, comes back to England for a visit to her cousin (I think it’s a cousin) former film star Eve (still famous and glam but not quite as famous as she was) whose daughter is getting married to the wrong man, and with whose husband Meredith had an affair years before, justifying it to herself because Eve treated him very badly, and still wondering if he would ever have left his wife for her as he promised to.

Sadly death intervened before that was meant to happen, and all these years later, Meredith still hasn't found closure. 

Alan Markby is brought into the matter when a neighbour is killed, shortly after several very unpleasant ‘gifts’ are left for the bride to be, and between them they unravel the case, both attracted to the other in an incredibly low key ‘is this really happening to me?’ way.

Meredith is actually quite an irritating person, but that's part of what makes her interesting. Her internal ambivalence about Markby, her tendency to judge women more harshly than men - especially in the first book, where there is definitely some baggage and some denial about how young she was when she became a shoulder for her cousin’s husband to cry on (not underage but in my opinion definitely young enough she really shouldn’t have been dragged into their marital troubles) - her trying to figure out why she’s spent so much time living a kind of nomadic existence. 

Once she'd mellowed a bit in later books I found my attention wandering, and got the impression that every book ended with her being rescued from peril because she couldn't keep her nose out of things best left alone (I may be exaggerating slightly here, it was just an impression).

Another slight frustration is that so much of the action seems to happen off the page – in 12 books I don’t think we’ve ever seen Markby and Meredith kiss, and while I’m not a huge fan of gratuitous bleakness and pathology, there is a certain skimming over unpleasant details as well.  

Granger has also written three other series – I liked Fran Varady, couldn’t really get engaged with her Victorian sleuths, felt Campbell and Carter were just Mitchell and Markby mk 2 – but I enjoyed this return to the Cotswolds version of Mayhem Parva more than I expected to. The plotting seemed tighter, and the rationale for the murders horribly, pointlessly, believable. Maybe taking a break from them has breathed fresh life into the characters. 

Or maybe I’ve been missing them. After all, I have read every one – there must be something that keeps me coming back.