A Murder for Miss Hortense

Miss Hortense is a retired nurse, an excellent cook, and a very observant member of the Afro-Caribbean community of Birmingham. Haunted by a series of brutal murders that take place in the 60s, more than thirty years later she finds herself dealing with the fall out of what happened then and with some new misfortunes now. Mel Pennant's mystery is nicely layered, and how Hortense sets out to unravel what happened is often very satisfying, but for me the major enjoyment of this book lay in Pennant's depth of characterisation and her portraits of Hortense's community. I really believed in her characters as people—how they reacted and interacted, how they spoke and moved. My one minor quibble is that the chapters felt a little too short show more for me, especially since we shifted from POV to POV. I'd be just starting to get comfortable with one character and we'd be onto the next. Hopefully that's something that the sequel—hinted at by the ending here—will remedy that. show less

Miss Hortense is trimming her Deep Secrets rose bush (planted years earlier as a reminder of something she can never forget) when her hypochondriac friend Blossom stops by to tell her Constance Brown has died. This is momentous news, because Constance has been the Pardner Lady for the past thirty years, after taking that role over from its founder, Hortense. When Blossom wonders aloud if Constance may have been murdered, Hortense dismisses it – but only to avoid her friend joining her in an investigation that might lead to danger.

A pardner is a financial arrangement among a group of trusted participants who pool their money and make loans to one another on a rotating basis – particularly useful in an era when British banks refused show more to serve Blacks. When Jamaicans arrived in England as part of the Windrush Generation to help with a labor shortage after World War II, they brought this informal banking and investment tradition with them. Hortense was one of the group’s original founders in 1963, using her share of the pooled finances to buy a little house, but was abruptly ostracized for reasons we only learn about later.

When Hortense was part of the pardner, members loaned funds to one another which helped them establish roots, buy homes, fund a community center, and invest in starting a funeral home after a member’s son’s body was treated disrespectfully by a white undertaker. They also began “Looking Into Bones” – investigating crimes, like the fatal beating of the funeral home owner’s son, that were not taken seriously by the police. It was the twelfth “bones” investigation that was Hortense’s undoing.

Someone was attacking women brutally. When Hortense urged a friend in the pardner to follow a speeding vehicle, they crashed, and her friend was killed. The accident not only led to Hortense’s ejection from the pardner and from her circle of friends, it laid the groundwork for another mystery. Decades later, a dying woman’s last words to her estranged daughter were “it’s bone twelve. The Pardner Lady is watching. It’s her fault.” That sets the daughter on a quest to track down the Pardner Lady and find out what it all means.

It’s interesting to see how the cozy sub-genre has recently become a gateway for diverse voices from marginalized communities that are too often perceived as places of violence, danger, and menacing foreignness. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiments drive political discourse and lead to injustices (such as the 2018 “Windrush scandal” in which Jamaicans who had lived in Britain for decades but couldn’t prove they had arrived during the Windrush rebuilding efforts were unfairly detained and deported), the small, tight-knit community setting and the not-too-violent plots so typical of the cozy mystery provide a fertile ground for sharing the domestic lives of immigrants and other marginalized populations.

A Murder for Miss Hortense immerses the reader in the Jamaican community in a Bigglesweigh, a fictional suburb of Birmingham, weaving between events of the early 1960s and the early 2000s. The characters speak in a distinctive patois and their relationships and local culture are flavored with their roots in the Caribbean and the often painful reality of living in Britain. The large cast of characters, shifting time frames, and multiple plotlines can make it difficult to put all the pieces together, but this series debut by a British playwright is a fine addition to the growing rainbow of cozy mystery series that lets readers spend time in a setting that is different than their own, yet not so different after all.

https://crimefictionreview.com/a-murder-for-miss-hortense/ show less

4.5 stars, this started out a bit confusing, but the characters and plot grew on me and I ended up really liking it. There are strong feelings around family and religion and hidden secrets turned up, so it's not cozy like the cover might lead you to believe. I couldn't quite figure out why our narrator was comfortable dropping an F bomb but had to say "a very bad word starting with B" a few times, that was funny.

The publisher's blurb is an on-target hook for me. As a retired nurse in the US, I am well aware of our ingrained critical thinking, and both inductive/deductive reasoning is easily applied to sleuthing and other sneaky pursuits. Miss Hortense and Blossom are a somewhat mismatched team but make for a lot of sly humor. Nice twisty cozy with a dramatic ending. Loved it and looking forward to more!
I requested and received a temporary uncorrected digital galley from Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Pantheon courtesy of NetGalley. Pub Date Jun 10, 2025
#AMurderforMissHortense by @mel_pennant @aaknopf @pantheonbooks @vintagebooks
#mysteryfiction #cozymystery #retirednurse #britain #investigation #debutnovel #jamaicanculture show more #cozymysteryseries #womensleuths #recipes #moneyschemes #suspense show less

Beginning is very slow, and I could not get interested in this at all. Decided to quit reading.

I absolutely ate this up with a spoon. It's a delight. I loved the characters, the sense of place and history, the slow reveals, just all of it. I especially loved the dialogue; Pennant has an amazing ear for it, and she manages several very difficult tricks (for example, using a dialect some readers won't know) so well that she makes them look easy.

I also really loved this look at alternative justice and community building. This entire book is set in a community that can't trust the police or access most of the benefits of society around them, and it's fascinating to see this exploration of alternative approaches to banking, to social support systems, and to policing and how it works and doesn't work in the story.

I only enjoyed, not show more loved, the plot, mostly because this isn't a true classic mystery. Pennant does the thing where she shows you Hortense finding clues, but doesn't tell you what they are, and that is not my favorite approach to mystery writing. But I tell you what: I absolutely did not care at all.

I couldn't put this book down. It's a delight. show less