Dying in the Wool

December 19, 2011
Amateur sleuth Kate Shackleton, whose usual avocation is searching for servicemen who went missing during the Great War, faces a tight deadline in Brody’s stately second English historical (after 2010’s A Medal for Murder). In 1922, at the behest of Tabitha Braithwaite, an acquaintance of Kate’s from the days they were both with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, Kate must find Bridgestead mill owner Joshua Braithwaite, Tabitha’s father, who disappeared in 1916, before her wedding in five weeks to Hector Gawthorpe. Rumors abounded in the local wool mills at the time that guilt-ridden Joshua, a suspected womanizer, tried to drown himself after his soldier son was killed on the Somme. A further complication was his objection to Tabitha’s marrying the unemployed Hector, who may hold a clue to Joshua’s fate. Brody takes her time drawing together the missing threads of this mostly gentle cozy. Agent: Judith Murdoch, Judith Murdoch Literary Agency.

Set in the mill town of Bridgestead in Yorkshire after WWI, this mystery has more twists and tangles than a skein of yarn in a losing battle with a cat. Young Kate Shackleton is asked by her friend Tabitha to make a last-ditch effort to find her long-lost father so he can walk Tabitha down the aisle on her wedding day. Brody's characters are thinly drawn, and she assumes the reader lacks the ability to connect the dots and draw conclusions. Nicola Barber's narration is inconsistent. She attempts to distinguish characters with her voice, but in dialogue the voices are often mismatched, making the one-dimensional characters even harder to tell apart. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine