Classic feeling

Nicola Bridge can be excused for wondering whether all the decisions she has made have been mistakes. The detective has just upended her life and that of her family to move from a successful, respected career fighting criminal gangs in Liverpool to the sleepy coast of Dorset, where she grew up and vowed to never return. The scant resources and inexperienced crew she’s tasked with (definitely not as advertised) are bad enough, but now she’s staring at something she definitely hadn’t been prepared for: a corpse trussed up on a chair with a huge set of deer antlers affixed to his head, abandoned smack in the middle of the coastal road. So opens Chris Chibnall’s debut mystery, Death at the White Hart.

The victim in the chair is the proprietor of Fleetcombe’s local pub The White Hart, a man whose jovial publican exterior apparently hid a great deal, including the fact that someone hated him enough to murder him in such a brutal and public manner. It’s a small town, but a surprising number of suspects:  the resentful sister, the jilted lover, the competing pub owner, the angry farmer with a penchant for setting fires…and quite a few townspeople who are obviously keeping secrets. Chibnall largely avoids the presumed twists that come with a village-set murder mystery; Fleetcombe might look like a chocolate-box version of English life along the seashore, but it’s populated by real people with real problems that Chibnall expertly weaves into a compelling mystery.

Best-known for his crime show Broadchurch, Chibnall keeps the pace up, with short chapters, snappy dialogue, and red herrings aplenty. But the best aspect of Death at the White Hart is Nicola and her team. A bit of bunch of misfits stranded in the backwater of Dorset, they consist of a detective sergeant so young as to have never seen a dead body before, a constable who rarely ventures from behind his computer screen, and a forensic team shared across two other counties.  Yet each is compelled to do their best in the case of a rare murder—especially when the death scene evokes memories of an earlier set of homicides that still haunts the coast. But is Nicola up to the task of detecting the killer while still haunted by her own failures? Death at the White Hart is in the classic tradition of English murder mysteries. I wouldn’t quite call it a cozy, more a police procedural with a minimum of violence. Fans of Midsomer Murders and Knives Out will definitely find much to like here, as will readers of authors such as Ann Cleeves and Michael Bennett, with their small town-set detective novels.

Large print book