Book review: Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night by James Runcie

The fifteenth book I read in 2015 was the second book of The Grantchester Mysteries, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night by James Runcie.  My review of the first book of the series was not glowing, and this second installment only exacerbates my annoyances with the first one.

For one thing, while the first book covered less than two years, the second opens in January of 1955 and ends in 1961.  This ameliorates the "Murder, She Wrote" problem with suspension of disbelief, where one begins to wonder how anyone stays alive around Jessica Fletcher since she's always stumbling across murder victims in her small town, but it kills verisimilitude in another sense: In six years, literally nothing changes, not only in Sidney's life but in the lives of anyone around him.  No one marries or divorces or changes jobs or moves or has a child.  His sister is still dating the same man she was in 1953 without any mention of marriage, and neither of the two other vertices in Sidney's tiresome love triangle have gone anywhere over the course of eight years.   Frankly, this stagnancy is less believable than Cabot Cove's sky-high murder rate.

In addition, Canon Chambers continues completely to fail to be a compelling character with any depth at all.  There's actually a scene in which he is discovered and threatened by the murderer he is about to unmask which ought to be awash with tension, but instead it's, well, this:

"[Name redacted] lunged forward.  Sidney picked up a chair and threw it in his way.  He was going to have to get to the door as soon as he could."

Honestly, considering this is the same level of passion he's able to gin up for either of his love interests, I guess it oughtn't to be a surprise he's done nothing about it for eight years.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of the series is that Runcie 'cheats' at writing mysteries.  While real detectives can have hunches, fictional detectives aren't allowed to; part of the fun of reading a mystery is the opportunity to try to pick up on the clues in the text and solve the crime before the big reveal.  When the baffled police protest, "But how did you know?" the protagonist is supposed to respond with some small piece of evidence that didn't add up, not with a vague "Oh, well, I just had a feeling he might have been guilty...."

Even worse, the actual in-universe detective work is just as lackadaisical.  At one point, Sidney and Inspector Keating are examining the scene from which a man disappeared: "Montague's story suggests that Bartlett disappeared by running the length of the roof and disappearing through a concealed doorway in the south-west pinnacle."  Is this conjecture followed by the two men walking the ridgepole of the roof and discovered said concealed portal, perhaps leading to a further clue: a footprint or the thread off a torn sleeve, anything?  Nope, they just opine that it certainly could have happened that way and go back downstairs without even investigating whether Montague's theoretical escape route even exists.  Tremendously sloppy.

My intention of following through the rest of the series, however half-heartedly, has been weakened by this lackluster second installment.