Helen Holt's latest book is a 'cosy' - and very well-written and enjoyable it is. One of the subgroups of the crime novel is now firmly known as the 'cosy', though the genre has been around for ages - Agatha's Miss Marple was an early example and television's Midsomer Murders are almost all 'cosies'. The action is in a country village or in surburbia and the plots concern middle-class Machiavellies, often with a middle-aged lady nosey-parker as the investigator. And if it is not too politically incorrect to mention it, the authors are usually highly educated ladies, or ones retired from positions of responsibility. The parish council, charity fetes, dogs, cats, babies and tea-rooms feature regularly and as well as the criminal plot, the reader can often pick up tips on cooking and needle-work. I say all this with no sarcasm or cynicism whatever, for I enjoy cosies very much - indeed prefer them to gum-chewing, sharp-shooting action stories full of foul language and vicarious carnality. Helen Holt's 'Leonora' establishes its cosy credentials with discourses on the size of knitting needles and the keeping properties of rich fruit cake - I even learned that coating glace cherries with flour stops them sinking to the bottom during baking.
The story concerns an aging former journalist who was famous in her day and whose character seems to owe something to Kate Adie. In her dotage, she lives in rural squalor in a cottage on Exmoor, estranged from her brother and his wife, who want her out, to sell the land to developers. The sleuth is a friend, Sheila Mallory, an inquisitive widow who, like Miss Marple, becomes involved in murders with frightening regularity - this is the twelve book in which Ms. Mallory investigates. She finds Leonora dead in her cottage and the cause turns out to be E. coli infection, which the suspicious Sheila feels was done deliberately by contaminating the water supply. To everyone's surprise, especially the brother's, Leonora leaves all her money to a young television personality, who turns out to be her unknown grandson - and amid more family palaver, cream sponges, knitting layettes and the like, Sheila finally cracks the case - though I must admit that the denouement is a little disappointing, as I saw it coming for ages.
Still, a nice comfortable read, with no blood and almost no police - and now I know what to do about those sinking cherries.