The House of Green Turf (Felse, #8)
Ellis Peters
When world famous singer Maggie Tressider crashes her car on the way to a concert, she wakes up in hospital, dazed, in a post-operative shock—and haunted. From some secret place in her subconscious arises the awful conviction that somehow, at some time in the past, she has been responsible for a death. A psychiatrist, her doctor suggests, might lay the nameless spectre to rest. But Maggie chooses a very diffrent expert to find the truth for her. Her commission launches private investigator Francis Killian on a hunt across Europe in search of a grave. But the trail also leads him to one Bunty Felse, former colleague of Maggie’s, and wife of Inspector Felse. The successful end of Killian’s search is only the beginning of a long pilgrimage for them all—a journey which leads not only back into the past, but which takes Killian, Bunty and George to a remote corner of the Austrian alps, where many frontiers touch and many trails cross. And where even today some of them end—with murder...
Publication Year: 1992
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The Felse books are getting more and more melodramatic and less and less either classic English whodunnits or Felse-oriented. I started this series because I liked George Felse as a detective and I like Ellis Peters's elegant writing and I like cozy murder mysteries. But the last few have had hardly any George, hardly any real detective work, and are veering increasingly further away from the cozy murder genre. Am I supposed to care about yet another pale, delicate heroine with big blue eyes and a heavenly voice, and yet another would-be tough guy who falls for her charms? I've seen it before, and I'm getting pretty sick of it.
Also, I don't love the abuse-validating idea at the center of the plot's set-up: that X is responsible for Y's suicide because Y used the threat of it to persuade X into accepting Y's love. The fact that that is central to what turns out to be a fairly weak mystery doesn't endear the book to me any more than its feeble plot or cliched love story.
Still gets an extra star, for all my grouchiness in this review, because Peters IS a good writer in terms of putting words together into pretty sentences, and goodness knows I've read far, far worse. But I'm not sure how many more Felse books I'll be reading if they keep on down this path.
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