Murder in Highbury

Murder in Highbury (2024) Vanessa Kelly (Emma Knightley Mysteries #1)

Set in Highbury, England in 1815

Mrs. Emma Knightley and her friend Mrs. Harriet Martin stumble upon the body of the vicar’s wife, Mrs. Elton. Harriet panics and is foolish while Emma keeps her head and orders her friend to run for the Dr. Hughes (the coroner), the constable, and Mr George Knightly, who in addition to being Emma’s husband is also the local magistrate.

Emma and George live with her father, who is a hypochondriac.

He now expelled a tremulous sigh. “What a dreadful day. Why, it was almost as bad as the day your dear mother died. I can barely stand to think of the horror of it all.” Emma’s mouth dropped open. Her mother’s untimely death had transformed her father into the anxious and fretful man that he was today.

I found pretty much every characters in this story annoying, and many of them annoying and stupid.

Emma stumbles across a clue, forgets about said clue, and then goes off to investigate. Good thing chain of evidence wasn’t a thing in 1815.

No one seemed to have liked Mrs. Elton.

A liveried footman, another of Mrs. Elton’s innovations, admitted them. Mrs. Elton had claimed that one couldn’t possibly live with any degree of elegance without liveried footmen.

And I didn’t find the vicar, Mr. Elton, very impressive either.

“I was pondering the Eltons’ relationship. It was rather an odd one, you must admit.”

“Really? I thought they were perfectly suited to each other. Both condescending and petty in exactly the same way.”

Nor were the townspeople much better.

(H)is current pride and joy. One would think his children would qualify as such, but knowing Mr. Cox’s impertinent daughters, Emma couldn’t blame the man for preferring his horse.

We keep hearing how horrible the Cox daughters are and how badly one should feel for their parents, except that said parents make no effort to keep their daughters from being mean, nasty, shallow creatures.

The constable is called dimwitted and ineffective, despite the fact he is clearly doing the best he can in the situation, in a position for which he has no training.

“While the parish vestry was generous in paying him a small salary, it is hardly adequate for a task of this nature. He is a farmer as well as a constable, as you know, I’m sure he’d rather be minding his own business than tracking down poachers or keeping order in taverns. It’s a thankless job which very few men wish to take on.”

No wonder no one wants the job, if the wife of the magistrate is going to go around constantly belittling him, hiding evidence, and trying to keep him from interviewing suspects.

Also, I was pretty certain who the murderer was within the first few pages, yet we had 400 more pages before the resolution. I’d started skimming long before then, just wanted to know the why.

I was not pleased when I finally learned the answer.

SPOILER

Of course the murderer was a “madman” who managed to fool everyone until his posturing in the final chapters when confronted with his misdeeds.

I found the madman and his “reasons” for his actions to be both absurd and petty and tremendously unlikely. Killing for money makes sense. But none of the killer’s confessions–or the conclusions the characters drew about the killer’s motives–made any sense at all.

END SPOILER

Even speed reading, that’s hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Characters: Emma Knightley, George Knightley, Harriet Martin, Robert Martin, Mrs. Elton, Dr. Hughes, Constable Sharpe, Mr. Perry, Miss Henrietta Bates, Mrs. Bates, Patty, Jane Fairfax Churchill, Frank Churchill, Simon, Mrs. Weston, Mr. Cox, Miss Anne Cox, Lucy Peters, Mr. Horace Suckling, Selina Suckling, Mrs. Hodges, Harry, Mrs. Wright, William Larkins, Dick Curtis

Publisher: Kensington

Rating: 3/10

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