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A review by kindleandilluminate
The House of Green Turf by Ellis Peters
2.0
The Felse books are getting more and more melodramatic and less and less either classic English whodunnits or Felse-oriented. I started this series because I liked George Felse as a detective and I like Ellis Peters's elegant writing and I like cozy murder mysteries. But the last few have had hardly any George, hardly any real detective work, and are veering increasingly further away from the cozy murder genre. Am I supposed to care about yet another pale, delicate heroine with big blue eyes and a heavenly voice, and yet another would-be tough guy who falls for her charms? I've seen it before, and I'm getting pretty sick of it.
Also, I don't love the abuse-validating idea at the center of the plot's set-up: that X is responsible for Y's suicide because Y used the threat of it to persuade X into accepting Y's love. The fact that that is central to what turns out to be a fairly weak mystery doesn't endear the book to me any more than its feeble plot or cliched love story.
Still gets an extra star, for all my grouchiness in this review, because Peters IS a good writer in terms of putting words together into pretty sentences, and goodness knows I've read far, far worse. But I'm not sure how many more Felse books I'll be reading if they keep on down this path.
Also, I don't love the abuse-validating idea at the center of the plot's set-up: that X is responsible for Y's suicide because Y used the threat of it to persuade X into accepting Y's love. The fact that that is central to what turns out to be a fairly weak mystery doesn't endear the book to me any more than its feeble plot or cliched love story.
Still gets an extra star, for all my grouchiness in this review, because Peters IS a good writer in terms of putting words together into pretty sentences, and goodness knows I've read far, far worse. But I'm not sure how many more Felse books I'll be reading if they keep on down this path.