Wed 27 Feb 2019
A Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: DEBORAH CROMBIE – Leave the Grave Green.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
DEBORAH CROMBIE – Leave the Grave Green. Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James #3, Scribner, hardcover, 1995. Berkley, paperback, 1996. Avon, paperback, 2005.
I like Crombie’s books. They strike me as crosses between village mysteries and British cozies, and I think they’re well done.
[Detective Superintendent Duncan] Kincaid and [Sergeant Gemma] James are dispatched from Scotland Yard to handle a politically sensitive case a little way down the Thames. The so-in-law of two titles personages who are major figures in British opera has been found washed up in a lock, and it appear that murder is a possibility.
The family is an odd one; the daughter lived with her parents rather than her deceased husband, while he continued to occupy their flat. No one seems terribly cut up about it all, and clues are scarce. Nothing to do but get out the spades and start digging, so they do.
I commented about a previous book in the series that I thought Crombie overdid having Kincaid lust after every woman in the story, and that hasn’t changed. WARNING: PLOT ELEMENTS REVEALED. Some readers seem to prefer their fictional heroes with large warts. but I don’t. Crombie puts a couple of dandies on Kincaid here, and it lessens his appeal to me as a protagonist. Simply if inelegantly put, he screws both a suspect and his comely Sergeant, and that doesn’t make him more human, it just makes him stupid. Well, maybe that’s the same thing. END WARNING.
Aside from all that, this was a piece with the two previous books: well written, nicely characterized, decently plotted, and an enjoyable read.
February 28th, 2019 at 5:24 pm
There are now, or will be, 18 books in this series, with A BITTER FEAST scheduled to appear sometime this year.
That’s a pretty good run. I don’t know much about the series myself, having read only one, and that was a long time ago. From looking at short synopses of the books, it appears that the relationship between Kincaid and James has been both ongoing and rocky. When James gets promoted, the pair begin tackling separate cases which then seem to converge into one.
In the one I read, I do remember being more interested in the mystery than I was with the relationship between the two leading characters. But that was me. Crombie, born in Texas and still living there half the time, certainly has quite a few fans.
February 28th, 2019 at 7:31 pm
A bit too much of Kinkaid and James and too little of the mystery, but they are an interesting pair and the mystery element is good. Crombiw would never be a regular on my list, but I certainly would pick one up once and a while and enjoy it even if I didn’t want another too closely after.
Crombie can write, and can write a mystery, and as Barry pointed out these fit fairly well into the British village mystery tradition, cozy in a different sense than what we mean by the term today.