Murder Before Evensong: The instant no. 1 Sunday Times bestseller (Canon Clement Mystery)

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What was with all the pretentious words/phrases? For the first chapter or two I didn't mind. Oh how nice I thought, it's not dumbed down. Then the novelty wore off. As readers we were expected to be familiar with a load of French and Latin phrases and some pretty hard vocab. I didn't understand why; I can't imagine the cast of characters would really have used that language, so maybe it was just the author showing off. Whatever it was, it was quite annoying. There were also a lot of historical and literary references and ecclesiastical terminology.

MANY clergy, in full retreat from a life of remorseless professional benignity, acquire a taste for murder of the fictional variety. Richard Coles ( Feature, 17 June) has relinquished parish ministry to write a murder mystery — the first in a trilogy — featuring an involuntary clerical sleuth, Canon Daniel Clement, AKC, Rector of the rural parish of Champton St Mary.Throw in some tonally-jarring casual mentions of animal death and the 2-star rating is cemented. Whether you're a cat person, a dog person or a rabbit person, you're guaranteed to feel a little twinge of pointless distress at some point along the way. There is a motive, however, and, when I thought my eyes couldn’t roll anymore, after the reverend’s sudden realisation of who the murderer is, they still rolled some more as I read about the motive for the murders. English villages are notorious havens for murderers – think of all the untimely deaths to have taken place across the county of Midsomer or in Agatha Raisin’s new home of Carsely in the Cotswolds. Now, with a nod to its most famous predecessor, Miss Marple’s home of St Mary Mead, the quintessentially English village of Champton joins the fray. “Two murders… in as many weeks. That must surely be way above the odds for an English country village, even St Mary Mead. What on earth is going on?” says the daughter of one of the victims.

But despite all this, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. It is well-written and smart with a touch of humour. Overall, a pretty good debut and, if this is the start of a series, I would happily read more of Canon Daniel Clement’s crime-solving adventures in future books.Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton, a small village with its own stately home owned by Bernard de Floures. The most exciting thing to happen in Champton is the argument as to whether the church should install a lavatory or a buttery for the flower arrangers, then Bernard de Floures' alcoholic cousin is found by Daniel, murdered in one of the pews, with a pair of secateurs no less! But no sooner have the press departed to pastures new and the village returned to some sort of normality, than another body is found floating in the lake.

The Rector of Champton, Canon Daniel Clement is lives with Audrey, his widowed mother and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda in the Rectory. The big news in the parish is the announcement of a new toilet in the church which seems to cause more rumpus than anyone expected. Also, huge props to the editor who saw the dialogue line "Why would anyone murder Bob?" and inserted a tidy comma to make it "Why would anyone murder, Bob?" despite Bob not being in the conversation due to having been, er, murdered. (Quoted from memory and name changed to avoid spoilers.) Author Richard Coles is well known in the UK for being a previous member of The Communards and also for appearing on many television shows as a witty and companionable guest, so I was keen to read his first mystery and I was delighted that I found it a really enjoyable read. The book started well and the initial murder was sufficiently well carried out to spark my interest but then the book really sagged. The story wasn’t bad but there was just so much detail that the plot became bogged down. The story was set in the late eighties and this was primarily established by many updates about what Daniel and his mother were watching on TV. There was just too much incidental information that did nothing to give us extra information about the characters or the plot. So the scene is set for more than one murder in the company of a cast of finely drawn characters, immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with parish life. Coles is a sharp observer of human nature, but his observations are tempered with both humour and compassion, and much of the pleasure in the book lies in the incidental asides: “uncertainty and cluelessness, the hallmarks of authentic Christian discipleship”, or “supper, a light collation, he hoped, after the pound and a half of date and walnut cake he had felt duty-bound to consume”.

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I’m pretty sure I read most of this book without actually reading it, because I couldn’t bother. Most of the story is about the daily occurrences of the parish and there is no crime investigation. Sure, murders do happen, but, contrary to what I thought, this is not a story where the vicar, rectory, or whatever, investigates them. He just stays there, doing what he normally does, until the last chapters of the book, where he has a certain, I don’t know, realisation?, and he knows exactly who the murderer is. And I can assure you it is nearly impossible to guess in this instance. It could be anyone from this cast of indistinguishable characters, or no one, because there doesn’t seem to be any discernible motive. But between a family of idle aristocrats, embittered clam frogs and the son of a punk-looking Lord, he has a good range of suspects. Second, this was like some nineteenth century novel that you got forced to read at school, billed as a funny detective story. There was an interminable amount of detail about the life of a rector, the prayers, the ceremonies, and a lot in Latin which meant nothing to me. In addition, frankly there are absolutely no clues whatsoever to help the reader guess the murderer and the identification of the murderer comes out of left-field. Half of Daniel's (and his mother's) thoughts went straight over my head, too obtuse and loaded with religious terminology.