Mon 10 Feb 2020
A Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: VERONICA STALLWOOD – Oxford Exit.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[6] Comments
VERONICA STALLWOOD – Oxford Exit. Kate Ivory #2. Scribner, US, hardcover, 1995. Np US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, 1994.
Yet another author new to me. Stallwood was born in London and lives in Oxford, where she has worked at the Bodelian and Lincoln College libraries. The first book in this series is Death and the Oxford Box.
Kate Ivory is a struggling romance novelist who has experience with computers and library cataloguing. She is called on by a friend to help investigate a possible series of thefts from the Oxford University Library System, and after agreeing is plugged into the system as a roving cataloger and consultant.
Shady doings are afoot, all right, and Kate discovers that a young library assistant who was murdered in the recent past may have stumbled across them also, What seemed to be a relatively safe assignment now takes on a darker hue.
Were this an American book, I’d call it a cozy, but given how I’ve defined those I think I’d be doing this an injustice. I like Stallwood’s prose, and I like her characters, an dI like the milieu. She tells her story by interleaving chapters told from the viewpoints of Kate and the anonymous murderer, and I thought she made unusually good use of the device.
Secondary characters were also well done. It’s a type of book that British authors do exceptionally well, and Stallwood does this reputation no harm.
The Kate Ivory series —
1. Death and the Oxford Box (1993)
2. Oxford Exit (1994)
3. Oxford Mourning (1995)
4. Oxford Fall (1996)
5. Oxford Knot (1998)
6. Oxford Blue (1998)
7. Oxford Shift (1999)
8. Oxford Shadows (2000)
9. Oxford Double (2001)
10. Oxford Proof (2002)
11. Oxford Remains (2004)
12. Oxford Letters (2005)
13. Oxford Menace (2008)
14. Oxford Ransom (2011)
February 10th, 2020 at 4:35 pm
Barry began this review by saying, “Yet another author new to me,” and here it it is, some 25 years later and 14 books in all, and both the author and the series in this series are new to me.
Worth looking into, I think, and about time.
February 11th, 2020 at 6:49 am
Yet another author I bought in the ’90s in Britain to sell, and yet another I never tried to read.
February 11th, 2020 at 7:06 am
I’ve just purchased an inexpensive copy of the first one from an abebooks seller. At less than $4 including postage, I can’t go too far wrong.
February 12th, 2020 at 9:54 pm
i’m a sucker for mysteries set in the library system.
February 12th, 2020 at 10:27 pm
Me too. As soon as the book I ordered arrives, it goes right on the top of the TBR pile.
February 28th, 2020 at 12:59 am
I now have the first book in the series, DEATH AND THE OXFORD BOX. Over the course of three evenings, I’ve read 186 pages (out of 277), and this is as far as I’m going to go. The book opens well, but the pace has slowed to a crawl
One gets the impression that Stallwood made a serious mistake (from my point of view) in thinking she was writing a novel, rather than a detective mystery.
I agree with Barry. The book is not a cozy, but the mystery content spread out so thin as it is, it comes awfully close to being one.