Friday, September 9, 2011

Deadly Reunion: Review


Well...that was one of my more disappointing impulse grabs from the library's new arrival shelves.

When I read the blurb for Geraldine Evans' Deadly Reunion, I was entranced and just had to take it home with me. See...here's what I mean:


Loves, labours, losses and not to mention a spattering of the occult are all part of an education at the prestigious Griffin School, but when a reunion culminates in the death of a high profile former student, DI Joseph Rafferty and his ever erudite partner, Sergeant Dafyd Llewellyn, are called in to unearth the truth behind the school's picturesque facade. Murder? Suicide? Or is the chef's cooking to blame? As ever the case is never simple for this policing pair, especially with a home office official as a suspect and a budget-obsessed superintendent breathing down their necks.

And I thought, Oh boy! Another academic-type mystery to add to my collected readings! Yeah. We can say that, but I'm not so very excited about it. The mystery was fairly pedestrian. I didn't care for the protagonists. The interactions between Rafferty and Llewellyn just didn't work. Llewellyn is billed as "erudite"--a college man. But he comes off pretty much as a prig. I got a bit tired of him looking down his nose at Rafferty's fondness for pubs and a bit of bitter. And I'm not a drinking woman myself--but for heaven's sake can we not let the man have his pint? And the friction between Rafferty and his penny-pinching superior didn't really come off either. I just don't think Evans has a real way with characterization. The prose is fine--flows very nicely. But it would have helped if that nice prose had been about characters and a story that I really cared about. One and a half stars.

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