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Summary
Summary
The first of the Grantchester Mysteries, and inspiration for the PBS/Masterpiece television series, finds Vicar Sidney Chambers beginning his career, as both a spiritual leader and a detective.
It is 1953, the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II . Sidney Chambers, vicar of Grantchester and honorary canon of Ely Cathedral, is a thirty-two-year-old bachelor. Tall, with dark brown hair, eyes the color of hazelnuts, and a reassuringly gentle manner, Sidney is an unconventional clerical detective. He can go where the police cannot.
Together with his roguish friend, inspector Geordie Keating, Sidney inquires into the suspect suicide of a Cambridge solicitor, a scandalous jewelry theft at a New Year's Eve dinner party, the unexplained death of a jazz promoter's daughter, and a shocking art forgery that puts a close friend in danger. Sidney discovers that being a detective, like being a clergyman, means that you are never off duty, but he nonetheless manages to find time for a keen interest in cricket, warm beer, and hot jazz-as well as a curious fondness for a German widow three years his junior.
With a whiff of Agatha Christie and a touch of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, The Grantchester Mysteries introduces a wonderful new hero into the world of detective fiction.
Author Notes
James Runcie is an award-winning filmmaker and novelist. Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death, the first in the Grantchester Mysteries series, was published in 2012, inspiring Grantchester, a primetime PBS series starring James Norton as Sidney Chambers. Other books in the series include Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil, Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins, and Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation . James Runcie lives in London and Edinburgh.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Runcie (Canvey Island) launches a promising new clerical series with this collection of interlocking short whodunits featuring a latter-day Father Brown, Canon Sidney Chambers. In the first selection, set in 1953, the Anglican minister presides over the funeral of a suicide, Stephen Staunton. When Pamela Morton, whose husband was Staunton's law partner and who believes Staunton was murdered, seeks Chambers out, Chambers agrees to ask questions informally, despite the skepticism of a friend on the force. His success in resolving Mrs. Morton's concerns proves to be just the starting point as an amateur sleuth. In subsequent chapters, he investigates a jewel theft, suspicions that a doctor is performing euthanasia, and a strangulation in a jazz club. The last case, "Honourable Men," is the strongest after the opening mystery, with a sophisticated plot centering on the murder of the actor playing Julius Caesar during a staging of the assassination scene from Shakespeare's play. That Runcie is the son of former archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie lends biographical interest. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
Joseph Olshan has stepped up and written one for the home team. CLOUDLAND (Minotaur, $24.99) is set in the bleak Upper Connecticut River Valley that forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, a place where spring doesn't arrive until it's summer. Catherine Winslow, whose intimate narrative voice keeps directing our eyes to the beauty of this stark landscape, is taking a walk when she comes upon the half-frozen body of a woman in a pink parka, strangled and stabbed and left beneath an apple tree to spend the past winter under a blanket of snow. Olshan handles some genre conventions clumsily. Although the victim is the sixth woman in two years found murdered in the same fashion, the police investigation is undermanned and sloppily managed. It's also implausible that both the lead detective and the consulting forensic psychiatrist, who just happens to live up the road from Catherine, would use her as a sounding board. But the shaky mechanics don't matter so much once Olshan gets down to the real business of observing the destructive impact the killings have on this isolated region. This is the kind of rural community where the transplanted urban professionals living on Cloudland Road normally get along just fine with Yankee farmers like Hiram Osmond, a secondgeneration knacker who butchers dead farm animals, renders their carcasses and sells the good parts to people who like to decorate with skulls. Now neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye. The characters are complicated, and none more so than Catherine, who's struggling to recover from the painful breakup of an affair with a former student that cost her a good teaching job and caused a rift with her daughter. Although Olshan is merciful to all the cruel lovers, faithless spouses and angry children who live in this lonely place, the bracing clarity of his prose doesn't allow for false sentiment. (He describes one savagely mutilated murder victim as lying "as still as a deepforest kill.") When speaking of matters like romantic obsession and violence in close relationships, a voice like that really cuts through the air of a cold climate. James Runcie, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, has written the coziest of cozy murder mysteries. SIDNEY CHAMBERS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH (Bloomsbury, paper, $16) is a collection of stories set in a quaint English village during the 1950s and featuring a young Anglican vicar who finds spiritual inspiration in criminal investigation. Addressing certain suspicions about the suicide of a local solicitor, Canon Sidney Chambers, the new vicar of the church of St. Andrew and St. Mary in Grantchester, is reminded that "how we love determines how we live." And investigating the theft of a valuable ring during an elegant London dinner party leads him to wonder how much a person can change over the course of a lifetime. No matter how much fun he derives from his sleuthing, Sidney tells himself that solving a tough case can teach him a moral lesson: "how to live an honorable life and protect the greater good." Taken individually, each of these clerical whodunits poses a clever puzzle for armchair detectives. Viewed as a collective study of British life as it was lived when Elizabeth II first ascended the throne, these stories present a consistently charming and occasionally cutting commentary on "a postwar landscape full of industry, promise and concrete." Psychological suspense is the genre of choice for glorifying the bond between mother and child: mother rushes into burning building, sacrifices life to save child, earns place in paradise. More than a flip paradigm, that's the actual plot of AFTERWARDS (Crown, $25), a gripping novel by Rosamund Lupton about a mother's nightmare. Grace Covey is among the proud parents on the field for sports day at the Sidley House Preparatory School when a fire breaks out inside the building. Cut to the hospital, where Grace is in a coma with brain injuries and her "appallingly hurt" 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, is in the burn unit. To add to her woes, Grace's 8-year-old son, Adam, is suspected of having set the fire. The eerie thing is, both Grace and Jenny have slipped out of their damaged bodies and become ghostly detectives, which takes considerable pluck and ingenuity. The second-person narrative voice assigned to Grace has its limitations, mainly because it's addressed to her wooden and inconsequential husband. "Be kinder to your wife," she's compelled to admonish him. "Out-of-body experiences do happen." Readers who might have drifted away from Katherine Hall Page's pleasing mysteries starring Faith Fairchild, the congenitally curious wife of a New England minister and the proprietor of a catering company wittily named "Have Faith," should accept the homecoming invitation extended in THE BODY IN THE BOUDOIR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $23.99). Although it's the 20th book in the series, the story is set in 1990, when Faith is still single, living in Manhattan and about to be swept off her feet by a young cleric she meets while catering a wedding at the Riverside Church. After their storybook courtship, Faith is making wedding plans when someone at her bridal shower tries to poison her. To be honest, the attempts on Faith's life are pallid compared with the retro fun of perusing a vintage wedding menu, shopping at Bergdorf 's bridal salon and having tea at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. Shallow pleasures, perhaps. But that's just the way it is. After a string of murders in a remote valley, neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye.
Guardian Review
The crime fiction debut of novelist James Runcie, son of the former archbishop of Canterbury, is the first in a projected six-book series, which will take his protagonist, Canon Sidney Chambers, from 1953, when this book is set, to 1981. We are told that 32-year-old Chambers, vicar of Grantchester in Cambridge with a good war record, has "a faint air of Kenneth More about him", though he seems to have more in common with the sort of charming but bewildered professional types played by John Le Mesurier as he solves a series of short, unconnected mysteries including a suspected suicide, a jewellery theft and an art forgery. The book is heavy on characters and rather light on plot, but the clerical milieu is well rendered as an affectionate eye is cast over post-war England - a perfect accompaniment to a sunny afternoon, a hammock and a glass of Pimm's. - Laura Wilson The crime fiction debut of novelist James Runcie, son of the former archbishop of Canterbury, is the first in a projected six-book series, which will take his protagonist, Canon Sidney Chambers, from 1953, when this book is set, to 1981. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
A cleric celebrates Queen Elizabeth II's coronation year by assisting a detective inspector in solving a series of genteel crimes. Canon Sidney Chambers, the bachelor vicar of Grantchester, has two best friends: Inspector Geordie Keating, who regularly loses to him at backgammon, and posh Amanda Kendall, junior curator at London's National Gallery, who shares a flat with his sister Jennifer. The six longish stories contained herein are threaded together by a seemly cast of villagers, parishioners, sharp-tongued Mrs. Maguire, the vicar's housekeeper and Leonard Graham, the effete assistant curate. In "The Shadow of Death," a congregant's request that Sidney investigate the suicide of her lover introduces him to Hildegard, the deceased man's wife, for a possible romantic entanglement. "A Question of Trust" introduces Sidney to a fancy engagement dinner in London and a missing ruby ring. "First, Do No Harm" returns him to Grantchester, where a pregnancy and a mercy killing precede a marriage. In "A Matter of Time," Sidney's love for jazz leads him to a Soho cafe that offers scat, drugs and strangulation. A portrait of Anne Boleyn disappears in "The Lost Holbein," and Amanda is kidnapped as she pursues it. And Lord Teversham, of Locket Hall, is murdered during a performance of Julius Caesar by one of the Roman assassins on stage in "Honourable Men." Only a churl could resist Sidney, whose musings on love, evil and morality, penchant for quoting snippets of poetry, preference for whiskey over the endless cups of tea he is offered, and ratiocinative success at unraveling crimes make him endearing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
There is something very appealing about a man of the cloth playing at detective; the convergence of the sacred with the evils of the modern world can make for delightful mystery reading. Novelist Runcie (The Discovery of Chocolate; Canvey Island), who just happens to be the son of the former archbishop of Canterbury, has bestowed upon us a new and delightful clerical detective. Canon Sidney Chambers is a relatively young vicar with a passion for jazz and backgammon who resides in the quintessential English village of Grantchester. This reluctant shamus continually finds himself embroiled in a variety of mysteries from outright murder to a jewel heist. Fortunately, Sidney has a stalwart companion in Insp. Geordie Keating, who also serves as his drinking and backgammon partner. VERDICT This is a strong series debut with an affable amateur detective set against a post-World War II England that is both evocative and informative. A gentle mystery read with strong appeal for devotees of ecclesiastical and English village mysteries.-Amy Nolan, St. Joseph P.L., MI (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
