Friday Forgotten Book: A Perfect Match by Jill McGown
A Perfect Match by Jill McGown, Fawcett Crest 1983 mass market paperback, mystery, first in Detective Inspector Lloyd & Judy Hill series.
“The September dawn crept over the sky like water on blotting paper, spreading a fine, thin light to supplement the yellow glow of the street lighting. In the town centre shopping precinct, photo-cells registered the increase, and the anti-theft store lights clicked softly, obediently switching themselves off.”
Once again, a recent Friday Forgotten Book review encouraged me to find a copy of a book. This book, to be specific, and, as it was at hand, just having come in the mail, I read it and here are my thoughts.
This is the first in a series, and I never know quite what to make of a first-in-series book. Is the author experimenting with setting and characters? Is this a plot that came to the author like a bolt of lightening, some inspired idea, an epiphany ? Or has the writer cobbled something together between lunch and dinner? With a first in series novel, you never know. So I sat, I read and here’s what I think.
Stansfield is a small English town an hour’s drive, perhaps a bit more, from London. Detective Inspector Lloyd Hill works on major crimes, but murder isn’t common. So it’s an unpleasant surprise when the body of a woman, dead, naked, strangled, is found in the woods near the boating lake just outside of town. The relationships between the victim, the family with whom she has been staying, her solicitor, his wife, the mechanic at the local garage, the estate agent working to sell the boating property to the town are all very tangled. In fact, the primary element in this mystery is tangled relationships. I suggest the reader pay close attention to that early on, or things will seem even more complicated than they turn out to be, and that’s complicated indeed.
I liked the book enough to try the next in the series, though it’s a bit off-putting when I guess the murderer very early on. Not that the author didn’t try to trick me away from my early conclusion, but I wasn’t convinced.
Another thing I should mention is that some of the relationships I mentioned are between the Inspector and his “charming young detective sergeant” Judy Hill. I assume that continues in following books. So if you’re opposed to a bit of “relationship” in your mystery books, you’ve been warned.
6 comments:
Jill McGown is another who died way too young. She was only 59. I liked the Lloyd and Hill series, which mostly improved as it went along.
Thanks for the further rec. As someone who is 58yo and hitting the anniversary in summer, I'll second 59 is way too young, indeed.
Oh, I liked this book very much when I read it, Patti. Thanks for the reminder of it.
I've always meant to try this series. I agree with you about reacting to the first in a series - one has to make some value judgments: does this author know what she is doing, is she doing enough to make me commit to another book, are the characters or the mystery the focal point, and so on. I remember being a little unimpressed with the first book in Deborah Crombie's series and with Still Life by Louise Penny, yet both turned into series I love enough to own, so it is not always easy to tell. But as Wayne Gretzy would say, you miss 100% of the books you don't read!
Constance
Patti, I loved this book and the rest of the books when I read them. Some of them I have reread, but not this one. I commented at Rick's blog when he posted this, although I had forgotten about it. The first book in the series is different from the rest but all are good.
I liked Megan's appearance on A VERY GOOD YEAR...was there a request to remove the post? Blogspot seems to be Acting Weird.
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