Maine Colonial's Reviews > A Fatal Affair

No matter how much her chief, DCI Jennings, tries to keep her down, doing things like filing and making tea, WPC Trudy Loveday won’t be suppressed. Jennings is “asked” by a superior to assign Trudy to work with her mentor, Coroner Clement Ryder, to look into his son David’s death, which has been assumed to be a suicide, caused by David’s remorse over killing his girlfriend, Iris. Jennings’s team will investigate Iris’s murder, while Trudy and Clement work on David’s case. Anyone who has read this series knows that Trudy and Clement are more likely to resolve their case—and maybe Jennings’s—before the other team get very far.

Set in the early 1960s, in Oxford and environs, this series illustrates the difficulties of a young woman trying to forge her own professional and personal path, and defeat the misogynistic assumptions and attitudes that are her everyday experiences. It seems that Iris had even more ambition to escape the social restrictions of life in her home village, though using far less reputable methods to do so. It soon becomes clear that the suspect pool in Iris’s case is much broader than initially assumed, and the reason for David’s death could easily be murder rather than suicide.

This is another entertaining read in the series. I do think it would be a good idea for the author to take a bit more time and care in her writing; she has a bad habit of repeating adjectives and adverbs in the same sentence, which makes it appear that she’s in too much of a hurry to be bothered proofing her work.