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This wise and often beautifully written novel remains most memorable as a sharp but sympathetic portrayal of everyday life in a small community and a clergyman's role within it. Whether you're a cat person, a dog person or a rabbit person, you're guaranteed to feel a little twinge of pointless distress at some point along the way. As the police moves in and the bodies start piling up, Daniel is the only one who can try and keep his fractured community together… and catch a killer. as Daniel locks horns with his flock over the matter of whether the vintage pews in St Mary's can be moved to make way for a new lavatory, Coles rivals Barbara Pym in his ability to make supremely low-stake conflict gripping.
A super-mix of characters, and a beautifully written plot that kept me guessing right to the very end. the plotting is woefully underdone (it's the kind of murder where anyone could have done it so you have to pick by motive), the murderer unconvincing, and the motive even less so. The Rector of Champton, Canon Daniel Clement is lives with Audrey, his widowed mother and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda in the Rectory.There was a lot of book before the first murder occurred and parish life did not seem unduly interrupted by it. This dignified, compassionate, beautifully written and a very clever (so far, I am only half way through) story is BY FAR, the best contemporary mystery that have read in a long, time. This book simply didn’t know what it wanted to be; diaries of a reverend, a murder mystery, or a comedic twist on church life.
He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother - opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey - and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda . We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Coles is a sharp observer of human nature, but his observations are tempered with both humour and compassion, and much of the pleasure in the book lies in the incidental asides.
The time period of the tale is never directly revealed but I’d guess late ‘80s or early ‘90s based on clues peppered throughout (am I the only person who didn’t know Celine Dion won Eurovision in 1988. If you like a large cast of one dimensional characters that you can’t keep track of, let alone care about, then look no further. Now I really like the Reverend Richard Coles and he has a winning writing style, but his publisher has done him a disservice by not being strict enough in the editing.
The debut novel from broadcaster and cleric Reverend Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong features Daniel Clement, amateur sleuth and rector of St Mary’s church in Champton, an English village surrounded by verdant hills and country lanes lined with primroses. Canon Daniel Clement is rector of Champton, and lives with his mother Audrey and two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. The plot was good but the ending was rather disappointing and rushed, giving little time or food for thought to enable the reader to speculate on the identity of the murderer. It feels like a series of interludes and chatter - one long paragraph on a biscuit tin description, for instance. He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother - opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey - and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda.I didn't like that the historic period it was written about was entirely unclear (only identified as 1988 more than halfway into the book when Daniel's mother watches Celine Dion win Eurovision in the TV), felt this was a missed opportunity for nostalgia and context. He is known for having been the multi-instrumentalist who partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band The Communards, which achieved three Top Ten hits. I have read a lot of mystery,romance diction recently by current American authors but they don't shine in the way that this does -- they are OK but only 3. Set in the late 1980s, the book introduces us to a cast of characters including: flower arrangers Stella Harper and Anne Dollinger; an aristocratic landowner, Bernard de Floures; a retired headmaster Ned Thwaite; and Daniel’s no-nonsense mother, Audrey, who “sometimes reminded [Daniel] of Pope Pius IX, who responded to the loss of sovereign powers over the papal states by making himself infallible”.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The story is set in a small village and there are a lot of characters, so many that I sometimes lost track of who they were. But between a family of idle aristocrats, embittered clam frogs and the son of a punk-looking Lord, he has a good range of suspects.And so many villagers are thrown at you at the beginning that the book only becomes a page turner when you start flicking backwards to find out who they all are. I didn’t guess whodunnit, although that didn’t surprise me as I was still trying to work out who was who. As readers we were expected to be familiar with a load of French and Latin phrases and some pretty hard vocab. First, when exactly was this book set, I'm sure if I could be bothered to piece together the clues I could work it out, late 1980s/early 1990s? This is quite a enjoyable mystery, and I didn’t guess whodunnit, which is always satisfactory, though the motive for the murder seemed a bit far fetched - but I suppose people have been killed for strange reasons.
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