Cheryl R. (Spuddie) - , reviewed A mediocre start to a series on 7/19/2009 + 412 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

#1 Thea Osborne mystery, set in (duh!) the Cotswolds. Thea is a forty-something year-old recently widowed house sitter--a brand new house sitter on her first job minding the home of Clive and Jennifer Reynolds while they are on a Caribbean holiday. On the first full day of her occupation, she discovers a dead body in the pond on the Reynolds' property, which considerably livens up what promised to be a rather dull three weeks following Clive's extensive "do this and that" lists.

Thea's brother-in-law is a Chief Inspector in another area but has apparently been "looking into" some sort of fishy business in that area and although he won't elaborate, Thea wonders if this death has something to do with James's investigation. There is an odd cast of villagers, and definitely something 'weird' about many of them, and with Thea not knowing them or the history of the interactions there, it's all that much more difficult to know what's going on.

I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed with this book; it was disjointed and not really cohesive. I couldn't get a good sense of who Thea was as a person, and her actions were often very contradictory from one minute to the next. It wasn't really bad, just sort of... "meh" I guess. This series of books has been hard to come by--I've had the second and third books on my wishlist at PBS for about a year and a half and had only moved up one spot on one of the books. My library doesn't have them either, so being that I was not bowled over with excellence in this opening entry, I think I will delete them from my WL and relegate this series to one of those I'm choosing not to pursue.

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