M J Trow

Teacher Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell is looking forward to spending his summer break relaxing and playing with young son Nolan, but his plans go awry when his wife DI Jacquie Carpenter asks him to take their elderly neighbour and her friend to visit Haledown House, a stately home open to guests, as a special favour for the friend’s birthday. The visit proves disastrous, but the silver lining is that Mrs. Ariana “Harry” Hale-ffinch, whose husband owns Haledown House, offers him a job: show more 1,200 pounds a week for him to stroll around the grounds telling stories about the site and its family to visitors, along with giving lectures and attending dinners with the house guests. When she sweetens the offer by including Jacquie in whatever dinners her schedule accommodates *and* offering to let Nolan spend days at a time at the stables (where he will be supervised by some of Max’s “Own,” former students whom he knows he can trust), well, what can Max say but yes? Of course, he’s only there for one day when the uncle of the owner is found dead, apparently having had his throat torn out by dogs, and then one of the American house guests is poisoned….This is the 20th in the Mad Max series; unlike most of the books, everything takes place away from Leighford High School where he works, but there are still connections to the school given that he knows most of the young people in the vicinity. I liked this one because Max gets to show off his erudition and also gently mock the (mostly) American guests he has been hired to entertain, while at the same time the dynamics of the family and staff running the stately home are well-drawn and believable. I think this could be read as a one-off, but this deep into the series it’s probably better for the reader to have started at the beginning of the series (“Maxwell’s House”) and carry on from there; recommended. show less

Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell is curious when the head of his school’s history department becomes part of an exchange sabbatical: he and his family are moving to California for a year, and a history teacher from an equivalent high school there is coming to Leighford, along with *his* family. This seems like an interesting change, but it turns out that the American family is just awful: sure, Hector (“Hec”) the teacher is a good guy, but his “cougar” wife is so self-absorbed that show more it’s surprising if she knows she’s in a different country, his mother-in-law is a depressed drunk, and his father-in-law is an enormous ex-policeman who seems incapable of not insulting everyone he meets on a continuous basis, not to mention sailing close to the wind when it comes to criminal behaviour. As they come into the town, a series of seemingly unrelated murders occur and both Max and the Leighford police are sure that this is no coincidence…. Oddly, this 17th entry into the Mad Max series is entitled “Maxwell’s Crossing” in some places and “Maxwell’s Christmas” in others (an odd choice, as most of the story takes place in January). It’s another entertaining story, however. The characterizations of the American visitors are so broad that they must be intentionally parodic, which fits well with Max’s own sense of the world, and I was fooled into thinking I had figured out the culprit only to be proved wrong, which I enjoyed. Recommended. show less

Archeological female amateur sleuth!

Interesting start to a new series set in London in 1900. Honorary Dr. Margaret Murray seems somewhat like a younger Miss Marples. She’s shrewdly intelligent, totally committed to her discipline, curious, and a pioneer for women in what has mostly been a man’s world. Based loosely on real person, Murray is an junior archeological lecturer at University College, London at a time when women academic staff are an athemna in the male dominated halls of show more academia.
A young woman who attends Margaret’s public archaeological sessions one afternoon a week, and moonlights as a street walker is dead. Another of her students, Adam Crawford (a constable with Scotland Yard) is convinced her death is a murder and not a suicide as the senior constabulary would want. Margaret is determined to investigate and makes the acquaintance of retired Inspector Edmund Reid.
Reid is drawn into the investigation by curiosity, another dead body, and a barely concealed disdain for the way Detective Inspector Blunt ( his successor) is stomping all over the murders, wanting a quick result, whether that is the truth or not.
Actually there were so many characters we were introduced to I became a tad confused. I delighted in the Doctor’s unflappability, but the pace of the story was uneven. In the end the reasoning behind the resolution and Margaret’s actions were just a bit too Dan Brownish for me.
Still, I’m eager to see where the good archaeologist might go in the future and will continue to monitor her progress.
The undercurrents of relationships, particularly sexual, in the hallowed halls of learning, have all the hallmarks of an academic Midsummers Murder type community, or as Jane Marples tells us the microcosm of a village (our village being the London halls of learning in the early 1900’s) where all types of negative behavior in the wider world are present.

A Severn ARC via NetGalley
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.) show less

I am sometimes hesitant to read fiction that uses real-life people as characters, but for some reason, I couldn't resist M.J. Trow's Four Thousand Days. Perhaps it was the time period-- 1900, right at the end of Victoria's reign. Perhaps it was the fact that Margaret Murray was a female archaeologist. For whatever reason, I'm glad I picked up this enjoyable historical mystery (and I appreciated the author's The Real Margaret Murray at the end of the book).

Dr. Margaret Murray isn't the only show more interesting character in the book. There's the handsome Constable Adam Crawford who attends Murray's free archaeology lectures on Fridays and has a keen eye for rooting out clues to solving crimes. There's retired Scotland Yard inspector Edmund Reid, subject of the popular Inspector Dier mystery novels. There's Tom, a former thief and erstwhile chef and server at Murray's favorite watering hole, the Jeremy Bentham. Of Murray's students, the standout for me was Janet Bairnsfather, "the Job of University College," who's much too rigidly proper to fit in well with Murray and her inner circle of students. Even the characters on the periphery are interesting, and sometimes good for a laugh or two, like the Herne Bay Decorum Society, "...a not-very-well-meaning clique of busybodies, largely female...who twitch curtains and look for outrage."

The mystery is a good one, and I was dying to find out what the archaeological find was. When I did learn, I think my jaw hit the floor. (And that was also when I learned the significance of the book title.)

Four Thousand Days is a well-written, thoroughly enjoyable historical mystery, and I'm looking forward to seeing Margaret Murray in the future.

(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley) show less