The seaside town of Whitby, overlooked by the ruisn of a famous medieval Abbey high on a cliff, is the setting for this new series featuring Liz, a widowed early retiree who moves to Whitby, buys the adjacent Kipper and Gull Cottages to live in and renovate. For company she rescues Nelson an English Bull terrier, and while walking one morning in the church graveyard near the ancient Abbey they find the dead body of the well-known Professor Crowby recently working on curating the Abbey museum collection.
When Liz hears the corpse had drowned, her curiosity gets the better of her and when she visits an antique dealer to get an appraisal on some old ginger beer bottles found during renovating and later hears that a valuable medieval girdle or belt worth 80,000 pounds has recently gone missing from the Abbey museum – that plus knowledge that the deceased Professor had been receiving regular payments from the same antique dealer – she returns to the shop with her pal Jilly and finds more than antiques, another corpse. This puts Liz and Jilly in an even worse position with the new caustic chief inspector. This makes Liz even more determined to discover how the two deaths might be connected but is at a loss and getting nowhere chasing suspicions and asking questions. The cottage renovation however is going well and between Mah Jong games, walks with Nelson and removing old carpet and laying new tile she’s pretty busy!
This is an English twist on the American fixer upper mystery sub-genre with the charm and mystique of the British village mystery and is entertaining with a down to earth, beguiling atmosphere. Another standard sub-plot of the cozy is romance, but it doesn’t develop in any of the standard ways making the story more convincing and likable.
I really enjoyed Death at the Abbey found it to be a well written traditional style mystery, gently suspenseful with a compassionate and realistic point of view; it wasn’t full of too many red herrings, nor too dependent on dialog to tell the story; it had atmosphere interspersed with daily life details, plenty of motives and interesting suspects and a genuine puzzle with a surprising ending.
I rate this mystery 4 kippers using elements from the book!
Plot: ***
Characters: ****
Setting: ****
Romance: **
Humor: ***
Social themes: **
