{"id":12432,"date":"2019-05-13T16:50:16","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T20:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=12432"},"modified":"2019-05-13T16:50:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T20:50:16","slug":"a-cotswolds-murder-by-roy-lewis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=12432","title":{"rendered":"‘A Cotswolds Murder,’ by Roy Lewis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When I bought<\/strong> Roy Lewis\u2019s A Cotswolds Murder<\/a><\/em>, I\u2019d forgotten that I\u2019d bought another volume in the Inspector Crow series (first published in the 1970s) and reviewed it some time back. I wasn\u2019t terribly impressed with that one. I liked this one quite a lot better. I might even become a fan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chuck Lindop was a man on the margins of civil society. A\ncon man, a charmer, a would-be burglar, he held down a respectable job as\nmanager of a \u201ccaravan site\u201d (what Americans would call a trailer park). But he\ndreamed of the big score that would make him rich \u2013 and he wasn\u2019t above resorting\nto violence when charm wouldn\u2019t do the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s no great surprise when his body is found in front of\nhis caravan, his skull bashed in by a crowbar. And there\u2019s no shortage of suspects\nwith motives to kill him \u2013 spurned lovers, jealous husbands, victims of his\ncons, and angry former associates. But the police have a hard time working out\nwho had opportunity to kill him, based on the comings and goings at the site\nthat night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So they call in Inspector John Crow of Scotland Yard. (By\nthe way, I read some time back that this never actually happens. Scotland Yard\nis a metropolitan police service, and does not provide consultation for\ndepartments in the provinces. But the visiting inspector is a hoary trope of\nEnglish mysteries, so what are we to do?) Inspector Crow is tall and skeletally\nthin, with a bald head. He looks like a vulture, but he\u2019s an empathetic man.\nHis great advantage as an investigator is his sympathetic understanding of\nhuman nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Lewis does an excellent job of fooling the reader\nwith red herrings in this story, and tops it all with a surprising \u2013 but dramatically\nsatisfactory \u2013 final surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed A Cotswolds Murder<\/em> quite a lot. I recommend it, and no cautions are necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I bought Roy Lewis\u2019s A Cotswolds Murder, I\u2019d forgotten that I\u2019d bought another volume in the Inspector Crow series (first published in the 1970s) and reviewed it some time back. I wasn\u2019t terribly impressed with that one. I liked this one quite a lot better. I might even become a fan. Chuck Lindop was … Continue reading ‘A Cotswolds Murder,’ by Roy Lewis<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[46,1304,2432],"class_list":["post-12432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-a-cotswolds-murder","tag-inspector-crow","tag-roy-lewis"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}