The Coffin Trail

Domestic Drama with Little Mystery
A review of the Allison & Busby eBook (2011) of the original Allison & Busby hardcover (2004).

‘There was a proverb I came across. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it.’ He took a deep breath. If only his translation skills weren’t so rusty. ‘It goes something like this. Skazhi s kem ty drug, a ya skazhu kto ty takov.’
...
‘The proverb, by the way, means Tell me who your friend is and I’ll tell you who you are.’

I've followed Martin Edwards' excellent work as the editor and introduction writer for the British Library Crime Classics series for over a decade. I also read a few of his short stories written for the Mysterious Press and thought they were terrific. So I decided to take the show more plunge and try out one of his full length novels. As a bit of a series obsessive, I went with this first entry of the Lake District Mysteries. Unfortunately it was a huge disappointment.

See cover at https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81tdrZWJSxL._SY522_.jpg
Alternate cover for my edition. It has the same cover blurb which says it is a "first-rate complex thriller", which has to be referring to an entirely different book 🤣.

Since it is the first of a series, you have to expect a bit of back story to set the scene and portray the personalities of the lead protagonists. But this just goes on and on with the domestic drama of both historian Daniel Kind and DCI Hannah Scarlett and their respective partners. It all centres around a cold case which is brought back into the limelight when Kind moves into the Lake District in a retreat from his life at Oxford, encouraged by his gf Miranda who wants out of London. The house they buy is a fixer-upper where a suspected local murderer grew up.

Meanwhile Scarlett is assigned to head-up a cold case squad, in somewhat of a demotion after a certain prosecution that she investigated fails in court. In her early years on the police force she was mentored by Kind's estranged father. With Daniel seeking to learn more about his father and to also perhaps clear the suspected murderer's name (who was a childhood friend) his path will cross with Hannah's.

This buildup takes an enormous amount of time with nothing much going on except for various shady characters making appearances as possible alternative suspects. Finally things begin to happen in the final 20% of the book. The solution comes out of nowhere, with little investigative basis. The end result even requires an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert.

One can only hope with Edwards' thorough investigations and readings of Golden Age of Crime classics that he was able to fashion more engrossing plots for his later efforts. This early 2004 outing is not reflective of any "first-rate complex thriller" writing skills. show less

This book was recommended to me as a first book in a police procedural series set in the UK, and, in this case, in the Lake District. I couldn't resist the title so I decided to read it. The book is very good indeed. We are introduced to quite a different protagonist. Daniel Kind is an Oxford don whose expertise is history. He has worked hard and has achieved tenure at Oxford University. Daniel has a backstory that is revealed intermittently throughout the book. To simplify, his father was a well-known detective in the police force who left his wife and family when Daniel was 12. His sister was a couple of years older. From that day forward his mother would not allow her children to speak of their father. We also find out that Daniel show more lost a previous lover, and the story behind that tragic loss is slowly revealed to us as the story progresses. When we meet Daniel he is on a road trip with his new girlfriend by the name of Miranda. They are travelling through the Lake District and see a cabin that is for sale. This cabin used to be the home of Daniel's friend Barrie Gilpen. On a whim they decide to chuck their lives in London and Oxford and move to the cottage to "get away from everything." The move turns out be a good thing for Daniel, but he does become embroiled in an old cold case that involved his friend Barry. Daniel, being the historian that he is, cannot help himself and begins to research this case to discover the truth. The main thing driving him on was that this was an old case of his father's which had ended unsatisfactorily . Daniel meets DCI Hannah Scarlett who has recently been put in charge of a new cold case division in the Lake District, and as Hannah used to work with Daniel's father, and as she had been involved in the original case, she decides to have her new team pursue this cold case first. Daniel and Hannah find each other during their separate investigations, and discover that they are a very effective crime-fighting team. After the whole village and countryside have been upset by the long-buried secrets that they uncover, they finally are able to solve this case. By the way the Coffin Trail is an old trail from centuries ago that mourners used to follow in order to inter their dead because there was no burial place in Brackdale, and this old Coffin Trail becomes integral to the story when foul murder is committed in Brackdale in the 21st century. The book is very well-written, and I have to admit that I did not figure out the murderer until it was revealed in the book. I'm definitely going to read more in this series. show less

I have a history degree, seem to read a lot of novels featuring academics, like mysteries and love the Lake District so, in theory at least, this one ticked a lot of boxes for me. In the actual reading it pretty much lived up to expectations. I did not find it quite as accomplished as Susan Hill's Simon Serailler novels or Stephen Booth's Peak District crime series, although that is to judge it against a very challenging benchmark. Both those authors, Hill in particular, do so much more than simply tell a good tale, whereas The Coffin Trail is best judged as pure entertainment. The plotting is good and there is, as another reviewer as commented, a well-executed twist towards the end. The frequency with which the main couples go to bed show more (and I don't mean to sleep), and the attention paid to the attractiveness of most of the female characters did make it seem like a 1980s best seller. The love making is not graphically depicted, there is just a lot of it. Now in real life I would rather people were making love rather than war, but a bit too much of this sort of thing can seem a bit cheap - unless that is, there is close description and plenty of expletives in which case it becomes literary fiction! Perhaps I should be thankful that is author chose to writer a page turning mystery rather than a work of art?

My favourite quote is from one of Daniel Kind's academic colleagues who says something like 'to quote one source is plagiarism, to quote several sources is scholarship'. A quick search on the web suggests this is based on a quotation from an American screenwriter called Wilson Mizner. It may even have originated elsewhere. I like it, whoever thought of it first. show less

This is the first in a series of whodunnits set in the Lake District, one of my favourite areas in the country. Daniel Kind is a disillusioned Oxford academic historian who moves to the Lake District with his partner journalist Miranda, buying a cottage with connections to the history of his family and their knowledge of a boy Daniel met in his childhood on a family holiday, who later died in tragic and controversial circumstances after the horrific murder of a young woman. Senior policewoman Hannah Scarlett looks into the case as the first of a series of cold case reviews. Daniel, as the son of the senior policeman with whom Hannah worked on the original case, creates ripples in the local community through his questions about the case. show more The final resolution is suitably unexpected, with some late twists and turns. The characters are well drawn, though I'm not sure yet if I quite like Daniel. But interesting enough for me to read subsequent novels in the series. show less

Daniel Kind and his girlfriend Miranda take a holiday in England’s Lake District, in a place where Daniel had spent a holiday as a child, and impulsively decide to buy a house and move there. At the same time DCI Hannah Scarlett is appointed head of a new cold case unit for the area and one of the cases the team looks at is the decade-old murder of a young woman who was, at the time, thought to have been killed by an autistic young man who died before he could be charged with the crime. Daniel has a dual interest in the case, having known the young man when they were both young boys and also because his father was in charge of the original investigation.

I grabbed this book from Mt TBR as I left the house for a walk yesterday (because show more I always reward myself for walking with a coffee and some reading time and the other book I am reading now was too darned heavy to carry). Starting a new book while away from the house is always risky (what if it’s no good and I don’t have a backup book?) but I needn’t have feared. I was immediately drawn into the story so one coffee turned into two and then a third as I struggled to find a place I could stand to stop so I could walk home. The series of converging events at the beginning of the book that drew me into the story so completely is really a superb piece of craftsmanship. When I finally stopped reading it was a bit of a jolt to find myself in Adelaide on a hot summer afternoon with a slightly cranky waitress asking me if I wanted another coffee as I really had been swept off to the Lake District, having conjured up rich images of the physical surrounds depicted in the book as well as of the village’s suspects inhabitants.

The two main characters were likable but not perfectly so which is just what you want in your crime fighters really. I thought the way Daniel wanted to know more about the father who had left the family many years before was handled well as was his internal struggles with other events in his past. These made his amateur involvement in the investigation very believable. I liked the way Hannah made the best of what could have been a bad situation when she was assigned to head up the cold case unit and I will enjoy seeing more of her in future books. The suspect pool also contained some well-drawn characters and I was well and truly blaming an entirely different villager than the person who turned out to be the evil-doer.

The English police procedural is a very crowded space which makes it all the more remarkable that Martin Edwards has produced a new and interesting slant on the sub genre. He’s done so with a combination of intriguing characters, solid plot and a thoroughly captivating small village setting. The Coffin Trail is the 11th book I’ve read so far this year by a new-to-me author and is yet another of that group that has proven so good I’m already scouring the planet for the rest of this author’s back catalogue. show less

This being my 2nd Lake District Mystery I did not know what to expect, I was extremely impressed. The Coffin Trail was I believe the first book in the series and it was not repetitive it could be a stand alone book. This was a new storyline with a new murder when Daniel Kind met Hannah and learned about his father. Still being a part of a series you had no trouble following or feeling confused because you went out of order. I can not wait to get more of the Lake District Mystery books. Wonderful!!

From Amazon:

Oxford historian and TV personality Daniel Kind and his new lover, Miranda, both want to escape to a new life. On impulse they buy Tarn Cottage in Brackdale, an idyllic valley in the Lake District. But though they hope to live the dream, the past has a way of catching up. When DCI Hannah Scarlett launches a cold case review into an old crime, Brackdale's skeletons start to rattle. Daniel and Hannah soon find themselves risking their lives as they search for a ruthless killer who is prepared to kill again to keep his secret.

My Thoughts:

The descriptions of the Lake District and the overall writing were enjoyable. However this was offset by the lack of character development. Also the relationships of the two main couples, and show more the coincidences were just irritating. The scene exposing the killer just wasn't realistic and I found myself having trouble caring about the story or the characters from that point on. It wasn't a terrible read, and it was the first book in the series...but there are so many better ones out there. show less