Humbleby is fun, but this not my favorite Fen - a bit dull ( )

Another snappy mystery featuring Gervase Fen, who's consulting at a film studio on a biography of Alexander Pope. When a young starlet kills herself, that seems sad but not mysterious. But then a camera man drops dead...
Lots of quotations and other fun references to look up. I don't know much about Pope. ( )

A re-read, I find Crispin's Fen books interesting but there's a remoteness about the writing that makes me wonder if Crispin actually likes any of his characters, and there seems to be a deliberate use of arcane vocabulary that's a little off putting (it's not the era, many other earlier writers manage without bamboozling the reader with their cleverness). This one is no exception, beginning (almost) with the suicide of a film starlet, which leads to a series of murders. There's a fantastic scene in a maze (not, as Crispin calls it a labyrinth, labyrinths have one route through them, an odd slip up for the author), which to later readers calls to mind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but I'm not sure it's enough to make one care too much. I'll continue with a re-read of others of his works. ( )

I found this entry in the Gervase Fen series a little disappointing - Fen himself is absent for a good portion of the book. The mystery itself though is one of Crispin's usual quality. I suspected the guilty party early on but then was led astray by the cleverly done red herrings ( )

Light but sufficiently enjoyable. Not very surprising except insofar as when the murderer was unmasked it took me a while to identify the name. ( )