I've been a bit under the weather this week -- just a sort of cold-type virus with a mild fever, not enough to lay me out but enough to make me feel tired and lacking in energy. I spent one day in bed but the rest of the time I have been soldiering on though not enjoying it particularly. So I was particularly delighted when this popped through the door. Crime fiction might not be everybody's idea of comfort reading but it certainly is mine, and this is an excellent example of the sort of thing I enjoy. It's the fourth in Martin Edwards' Lake District novels, the first three of which I have already read with great pleasure.
You probably know, even if you don't live in the UK, that the Lake District is a particularly beautiful, magical, slightly mysterious part of north-west England. We don't do really high mountains here in Britain, but there are some pretty impressive ones (known as fells) up there, as well, of course, as the eponymous lakes. There are also woods, streams, waterfalls, windy hillsides, winding roads, stone cottages and plenty of small pools, usually known as tarns. The area is probably best known, apart from its natural beauty, as the home of the poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A little less well-remembered is their younger contemporary Thomas de Quincey, who, if you have heard of him at all, you may know as "The English Opium Eater". Eat opium he certainly did (it was quite legal and could be bought at any chemist) but he also married a local girl and took over Dove Cottage in Grasmere when the Wordsworths moved to a larger house.
Why is she telling us all this, you are probably asking. Well, apart from the fact that I like rambling on about all this sort of thing, de Quincey features in the plot of Martin Edwards' latest novel. Indeed a de Quincey Festival is being planned, and the historian Daniel Kind, newly returned to his Lake District cottage after a spell in America, is to be a keynote speaker. His talk -- also the subject of a book he is starting to write -- is de Quincey's remarkable essay, "On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts". Meanwhile Daniel's friend DCI Hannah Scarlett is investigating a murder that took place several years ago, when the body of a young woman was found in the Serpent Pool, by coincidence just up the hill behind the house Hannah and her partner Marc have recently bought. This is a "cold case", but there seem to be connections with a recent murder, in which a rare-book collector has been burned to death amidst his precious library -- and soon a second and equally disturbing killing appears to link up with both.
Quite apart from the ingenious solution of the cases (in which de Quincey features in an unexpected way), the interest of the novel lies in the details of police procedure and also, of course, in the relationship between Hannah and Daniel, which has inched forward unbearably slowly through all four novels. Daniel is now free, as his neurotic girlfriend is back in London, but Hannah is still living with Marc though she is having grave doubts about the relationship and is, more than ever, drawn to Daniel (who I cannot help visualising as looking exactly like Daniel Craig, which makes everything even more delightful).
If you like good, solid, intelligent detective fiction, you will not be disappointed in this. Go get it!
