Book review: A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson

The fifty-fourth book I read in 2016 was A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson.  It popped up as a recommendation, either on Amazon or Goodreads, in response to some of my recent reads, so I looked for it in Half-Price Books every time I was in one for several weeks before a copy turned up.

I was recommended the book based on either the Maisie Dobbs series or the Grantchester Mysteries, or possibly the combination thereof.    Like them, it is a mystery (this book in particular being the first of a series) set in early-twentieth-century England; being post-World-War-II, it shares a setting more with the Grantchester Mysteries than with Maisie Dobbs, who is between the wars.  If the first book is anything to go by, these Very English Mysteries should be far superior to either of the other series.

The protagonist is Hugo Hawksworth, a spy who took a bullet to the leg in East Germany and has been forced reluctantly to settle down to a desk job.  He is the sole guardian to a thirteen-year-old sister, Georgia, both parents having been killed in the war, and the two of them move away from London to the sleepy town of Selchester.  They take up temporary residence in the Castle, the home of the late local nobleman who disappeared on a stormy night shortly after the war.  Lord Selchester's daughter is champing at the bit to sell the family pile but, in the absence of a body, has been forced to wait seven years for her father to be declared legally dead before she can take possession of her inheritance.  Of course, the arrival of Hugo and Georgia is swiftly followed by the discovery of a skeleton beneath the stone floor of the Castle, and the missing persons case turns into a murder investigation, one all the more delicate because Lord Selchester was a member of the foreign office and Cold War politics come into play.

I have a few quibbles with the book.  The chapters are broken up into "scenes," which strikes me as odd.  A few of the minor characters feel like lazily drawn types straight out of Central Casting.  But the main characters of Hugo, Georgia, Freya Wryton, the dead man's niece, and Leo Hawksworth, a Catholic priest and Hugo and Georgia's uncle, are both likeable and believable.  The author leaves a few clues unsolved at the end of the book, presumably to lead into the sequel(s) and create a series that is less episodic than Maisie Dobbs or Lord Peter Wimsey.  I look forward to following her trail of breadcrumbs into the next installment.