Wootton Windmill Mysteries #1
“I knew I had made a wrong decision but I didn’t know what to do.”
Debbie Burdett
Ellie Blix seems to see herself as the next coming of Mrs. Marple when she starts to investigate a former friend’s suspicious death. That is all well and good. Unfortunately, she appears to be on the verge of a mental breakdown throughout most of the book. Nevertheless, a fun small-town cast keeps things interesting, with Sylvia as a standout that makes up for Ellie’s shortcomings.
The first thing that caught me off guard was that I needed to pay attention to the subheadings in the chapters. The time is noted there, which moves more slowly than it seems, especially if the scene shifts between different characters. However, once I realized the significance, some things made more sense. It is an intriguing mechanic that reminds me of the transitions in some mystery tv shows.
Ellie seems to have latched onto looking into Andrea’s murder as a coping mechanism for her life falling apart. This is her first Christmas as a divorced woman. Her ex-mother-in-law has moved herself into the ancestral home that she might lose if her finances don’t turn around. Her daughter is sick, and she is overworking herself to keep her cleaning business afloat. Honestly, it’s a surprise she hasn’t gone further off the deep end.
Small-town gossip is the lifeblood of this book, as everyone will tell anyone else about every new confidential piece of information they’ve come across. It’s entertaining to the suburbanite in me that the people act this way, but I’ve never lived in a small town. However, it does cause some odd issues as secrets that have been kept for a year suddenly are openly discussed by everyone like they’d always known, while the ex-wife of a cop is discussing confidential parts of an active investigation with seemingly everyone.
This was a fun, small-town mystery novel with some highly entertaining characters. If Ellie can get her stress levels under control, I could see future books in the series being entertaining reads too.
