G M Malliet, “The Haunted Season,” St Martin’s Press 2015

Richard Osman, “The Bullet That Missed”–Viking –2022

To a real mystery fan anytime is a good time to start reading one, but fall, my favorite season, and the one most given to Mystery is, it seems to me the best. I’ve got two I want to tell you about.

G M Malliet is an American author, British -educated(Oxford and Cambridge, no less) who still lives in the US but obviously knows the UK intimately. She often travels there and her books are(I think)all set there. She had two other series and may have plans for more of those two, but lately has been confining herself to her third series, that of Father Max Tudor.

She began this series about the middle of the past decade has about a half dozen, so far. “The Haunted Season” is the third or fourth one I’ve read and by far the best of them. All of them are good, but this one sparkles, a jewel in the crown of “cozy” mystery writing–but perhaps not quite all cozy at that.

First of all, understand that Max is a priest of the Anglican Church(Church of England), not a Roman Catholic. This will explain the wife and child and the absence of references to Rome. He is a still youngish man, but not without worldly experience. He was once a spy for MI-5, British rough equivalent of our FBI. He eventually became disillusioned with that kind of work and decided there was a better way. Following that thought to its conclusion he became a priest and it now at about 40, still somewhat new to the surroundings, but a quick learner and a man who feels (mostly) comfortable with what he is doing.

For several years he has been the clergy of a church in Nether Monkslip in southwestern England. (By the way, that is a fictional name, but not an unreasonable one for a small English village. The spell-check on this computer didn’t accept it as correct, but rural England is full of villages with similar unusual–to the American ear, anyway–names) In the earlier books(and years)in this series he began getting involved in mysteries of one kind or another and is now regarded as something of a detective as well as a clergyman. He has also met and married the lovely Awena Owen, proprietress of the town’s New Age shop and a practitioner of New Age as distinct from traditional Christian faith. The Church has accepted her as clergy wife-worthy, though not without some doubts. They have a baby, only a few months old at the beginning of the book.

As usual there is a large cast of supporting characters, some more familiar than others. As Max goes about his work, he finds himself being pulled into the small village/rural area social scene and then comes up against a crime.(Not unusual for him, naturally)

The socially prominent family in the area, and owners of Totleigh Hall, are Lord and Lady Baaden-Boomethistle. They are not a necessarily sympathetic pair, but then who would be with that name? Lord Boomethistle is well into middle age and was widowed a few years earlier. The new lady B is a beautiful, ambitious young woman of charm and well, maybe other things too.

Lord B’s two kids are a son, Peregrine and a daughter, Rosamund. Peregrine seems to be a discontented, irresponsible layabout with no interest in learning, growing up or anything else worthwhile and appears to be wasting his time at Oxford. Rosamund is the family intellectual and I love the author’s description of her, “a proud egghead among a family of fox-chasing morons.” A bit of a lack of charity there, but not an inaccurate description of the young lady’s thoughts.

For good measure we have the Dowager mother of Lord B who is an 80ish novelist of the Barbara Cartland romance type, rich, arrogant and willing to look down upon just about anyone. And then there’s Bill Travis, the estate manager and horse trainer who seems to have attracted young Lady B’s attention, and is possibly returning it. Gee, now what could go wrong here?

Actually quite a bit, and there are characters and complicated relationships I won’t go into here. Let me say, though, that despite the large cast(there’s a “cast of characters” list at the start) it’s a well told story with a certain amount of insight into humans and their foibles and also with Malliet’s usually gentle but sometimes cynical humor.

I will not describe the crime which occurs, but suffice it to say it is remindful of a famous early american tale in some ways and involves a great deal of imagination on the part of the perpetrator and, well, the reader. It is indeed puzzling, playing as it does on horses, riding, the social society of rural England jealousies, resentments and other delightfully nasty emotions.

I suppose I won’t be giving away a lot if I say that Father Max figures it out, but not without a lot of trouble and effort and learning about his town and its people. I thought the ending which unfolds rather slowly but suspensfully for a British cozy was very good, a long way from the traditional get ’em together in the drawing room and explain. (Not that that didn’t work scores of times for Agatha Christie and a lot of others.)

I was surprised that after finishing this book, I looked it and readers’ comments up on line and found quite a few negative comments from previous fans of the series. The statistics they show are not bad,(the number of likes, dislikes, etc) but they posted mostly negative views and I think it’s only fair to mention this. The only criticism I saw there that I thought had some merit was that a new character, a young female priest is introduced early in the book and then largely ignored until the end. True, but I’d say not really a big deal.

I thought the human relationships and the delightful British small town rural charm, plus the sense of menace in the back ground worked very well. If you like this kind of mystery I suggest you give it a try. By the way, despite the title and a deliciously creepily autumnal picture on the cover the book has little to do with Halloween. But that’s my only real criticism.

Richard Osman is a whole other story and his “The Bullet That Missed” an entirely different type book, thought also a British mystery and in many ways well into the tradition. I did a blog on his first book. “The Thursday Murder Club” not long ago and also have read “The Man Who Died Twice,” though I didn’t write about it. “Bullet” is the third in the series which he seems to be turning out once annually.

For the uninitiated, the title of the first book is actually the name of a club at an expensive British Retirement Home. It is made up of Elizabeth, their leader and a retired MI-6 officer (similar to CIA in US), plus Joyce, her friend and a retired nurse and also a compulsive and revelatory diarist. The two male members are Ron, a former labor organizer and Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist. They meet for the purpose of trying to solve old, cold cases which have never been resolved. You will not be surprised to learn that they do this about once per novel. If you know mystery novels of this sort you’ll be even less surprised to learn that they always(so far, anyway)wind up in the midst of a mystery going on in Real Time.

The gang start out of the issue of a journalist, one Bethany Waites, who was apparently murdered nearly a decade ago. But no on was ever brought to trial for the crime and it eventually faded from public and police interest. Bethany had breen investigating a huge VAT racket(that is tax avoidance scheme) and there is a suspicion that was what led someone to get rid of her.

So they begin with the TV station and question Mike, the geniual host and old friend, and they question the detective who handled the case, and they meet Pauline, a TV makeup artist who falls for Ron. Their love story is soft pedaled to a large degree but is still and source of humor and sometimes real emotion.

But the group has now gotten started and as they should know by now once you start this sort of thing there may be no stopping it. Donna DeFrites and Chris Hudson, their two cop-friends from earlier cases show up and get involved. So does and mysterious and huge Scandanavian whose name remains unknown but whom Elizabeth calls “The Viking.” For not enitrely clear reasons he admits to involvement in the scheme. then orders Elizabeth to kill her friend, Joyce. He will kill Elizabeth, he says, if she refuses.

So now Elizabeth is twice- or really thrice-pressured. She is leading the effort to find out more about Bethany, she is (as always)dealing with Stephen, her demintia-stricken husband, and now has The Viking on her back demanding she kill a friend and threatening her life if she doesn’t.

Confused yet? Well, so is Elizabeth and so is nearly everyone in the story, It ranges from learning about ways of money laundering (some of the old ways don’t work anymore because of newer technology), about international “trade” of the most discreditable and deceiving kind, and the uses and limits of the British police photographs (CCTV) in solving crimes (This was a very big deal in the second book).

Elizabeth brings her determination and spy-training to bear on the issue and with the help of the others they begin, slowly, to figure it out. I will leave you to learn the details by reading this yourself. It would be a poor mystery critic who would put “spoilers” in a review, and anyway I wouldn’t want to try to explain the whole thing in any event. But to Osman, the explanation is in the end not that hard(for the reader–it’s tough on the characters) and even seems to make sense. Of course, you have to be patient with it and allow him to pull his usual last-minute tricks with surprises popping up like crab grass in the last few pages.

But the real reason for reading Richard Osman is not really the “mystery” part, although that’s good enough right there. But the biggest pleasure is in the characters he creates and in every book(so far)expands on bit by bit. We grow to love them and sympathize with them. We learn their feeling about age and its disadvantages and its few satisfactions. We learn how smart, determined people beat off the disadvantages, sometimes for years. And we also learn that as the Thursday people know nothing will last forever, not even their lives.

Osman can be uproariously funny at times, as I pointed out in my review of the first book. But I also said and repeat here, that I would not call this a “comedy-mystery.” It has elements of that kind of book in it and good ones too, but it has a lot from the darker side not only the things I just mentioned, but an often offhand, not fanatical explanation of how the world works and how much corruption, violence and greed play a part in it.

For all that I think I would recommend this as a morale booster if you’re feeling depressed. Osman is the most compulsively- readable author I know of writing just now and he is not to be overlooked.