Found myself so impatient with this that I went and finished it by reading (heavily skimming) a hard copy. ( )

I’m a big fan of Golden Age crime. I’m also a fan of contemporary writers setting their crime stories in the GA era of the 1920s. I hadn’t read the first book in Barbara Cleverly’s DI John Redfyre series but, as with most series like this, I felt that as a stand-alone read this didn’t leave me feeling like I’d missed anything. Cleverly tries hard to ‘humanise’ her detective: he has a cheeky Jack Russell terrier called Snapper, and a witty Aunt Henrietta who is witty and terribly well-connected… The setting is Cambridge, the characters are colourful, the plot is complicated.

An ex-military man who fought in the Boer War, Richard ‘Dickie’ Dunne, is bizarrely invited to dine at a prestigious Cambridge college, St Jude’s. What he doesn’t know is that this is part of a monthly dinner party hosted by a group of men calling themselves the Amici Apicii, and their ‘fun’ is to taunt and humiliate their guest during the evening, a ritual where one of them is named the winner for landing the most verbal abuse. When a body is discovered next to the college a couple of days later, wearing the same clothes as Dickie Dunne, our inimitable detective gets on the case. What develops is a complicated plot that involves several deaths over the last few years in Cambridge, and events that happened in South Africa during the Boer War and involving Dickie and the five other men in his unit. The book jumps about in different time frames, back to the Boer War and forward from the investigation to an interview with a suspect. Can Redfyre, his able Sergeant Thoday, and his boss DS MacFarlane solve the case, and discover the links to the other deaths…?

Whilst I found this a reasonably enjoyable book, I just couldn’t quite get into the characters, and the tendency to long-winded conversations – usually one to one – meant that any momentum gained by an exciting incident was soon lost. It also means that the book is very wordy, and (for me) slightly over-long. Coming in at 350 pages this is way longer than an average GA crime novel and it became a bit of a slog at times. The ending is interesting, and does raise various questions about guilt and the process of justice, but overall this was only OK. Three stars, but I won’t be rushing to go back and read the first on the series. ( )