The Retired Assassin”s Guide to Country
Gardening,
By Naomi Kuttner.
Cozy Crime has now become a successful and popular genre – one that
readers could tire of in time to come for its very predictability; the villains
always get what’s coming to them, and there’s just the right amount of romance
and twists in the plot to keep readers guessing. And there’s nothing wrong with that so far,
as retired MI6 Assassin Dante Reid decides to take early retirement and decides
that a remote little town in New Zealand called Te Kohe is the ideal place in
which to start a different life, the only snag being his reclusiveness and
utter lack of sociability and the incontrovertible fact that Te Kohe is like
every other small town anywhere: it thrives
on gossip, and the addition of a tall, handsome etc etc solo male with absolutely
no social skills is more newsworthy than Donald Trump.
Enter Charlie Wilson, a
young gardener calling to find out what Dante would require from his services,
which was tending to the former elderly occupant’s beautiful grounds and conservatory,
where a Corpse plant will soon come into bloom (the Horticultural Society is
mad with excitement!) and will require extra care. An employment agreement of sorts is reached
and Charlie is happy because he loves his job – but hasn’t been entirely honest
with Dante: he sees ghosts.
All his young life
Charlie has seen ghosts, usually the elderly of Te Kohe. This has given him a reputation of talking to
himself, which kind people dismiss as harmless eccentricity and the cruel make rude
gestures involving screws loose but, having ‘lived’ with this phenomenon for so
long, he has decided that his new employer needn’t be shocked by the supernatural
this early in the piece. In any case, there’s going to be a big social
occasion at Te Kohe’s poshest hotel very soon, everyone will be invited even
though they don’t like the town’s richest man who’s paying for everything,
including a massive fireworks display – he loves rubbing everyone’s nose in the
fact that he’s a success and they aren’t, but hey! He’s paying, and maybe a firework will go up
his nose: That would be something to
see.
And a murder does
occur, which leads back to other, older crimes concerning Charlie’s family and
the Town’s Richest Man: how to prove
that he’s not as clever as he thinks, particularly when Eleanor, a recent
sophisticated and elegant recruit to Te Kohe’s Upper Echelons, decides to lend
her considerable deductive talents to the mystery – ‘Helping the Police with
Their Enquiries’ takes on all sorts of extra emphasis, especially when Charlie
and Dante are both viewed as suspects and the police think they have a
cast-iron case.
Fortunately for
everyone’s nerves Ms Kuttner keeps all her ducks in a very clever row; every i is dotted and t crossed so that we can
prepare ourselves for the very next book in the series – which I hope will be
soon; despite blood and gore and ghosts,
the main, best ingredient is humour:
this was seriously good fun. FIVE STARS.
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