Victoria Dowd — The Smart Woman’s Guide to Murder (2020)

Preamble

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!

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Review

I haven’t read any of the Smart Woman’s series but have often spotted them on bookshelves and had them on my mental, not-yet-committed-to TBR list because what a great title, and a very fetching cover to boot. But I got the audiobook version of this on Libby, having temporarily forgotten how much I’d enjoyed audiobooks and then gone hunting for one.

Overall, I enjoyed the tone and first-person narration; I’m all for snide asides, although it’s not for every reader. I am also always happy to read books largely populated by women of a certain age, particularly a cast of “friends” stuck together for various reasons that have nothing to do with whether they truly like one another or their ostensible activities (a book club that, of course, never discusses the book). However, I did find the characterisations began to grate a little towards the end.

From an authorial point of view, I can see how this ends up being the case, as our narrator is a little monomaniacal, and she sees the others around her (relations and friends of her mother) as the same, and I think I may have found it less grating if I had read the book rather than listening to the audiobook. This suffers from some of the same objections I had to Vaseem Khan‘s latest, The Girl in Cell A, which is similar in featuring a not-entirely-stable young woman with (shall we say) challenging parental relationships as its core narrator and central detective. In committing to their characters’ voices, Khan and Dowd are forced to commit to some over-wrought narrative and linguistic choices that risk alienating their readers.

Plot-wise, however, there’s plenty to enjoy here, and the structure works well. I enjoyed the “cold open” (boom-tish) and the long circle back from the initial murder to catch up with events narratively, and Dowd deals handily with that common convention of the genre. Being a country house mystery, there are plenty of conventions lying around, from staff who are more than they appear and who generate instinctive social anxieties in the people they supposedly ‘serve’, to the protocols that supposedly structure upper-class life, to secret passages that facilitate playing tricks on each other. But they all play reasonably well and come together in a mystery that plays just about fair. I would have preferred to have had more of Aunt Charlotte, and she perhaps could have been a useful contrast to/relief from Ursula as the narrative voice, but I will happily try another in the series.

See also

These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• Lucy Foley‘s novels, particularly The Paris Apartment
• A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering (Andrew Hunter Murray)
• Phantom Thread (film)
• Death in Venice (film) and Hallowe’en Party (Agatha Christie)

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Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!