The Room of the Dead

A Betty Church Mystery, Book 2

By: M.R.C. Kasasian

Narrated by: Emma Gregory

December, 1939.

Having solved the case of the Suffolk Vampire, Inspector Betty Church and her colleagues at Sackwater Police Station have settled back down to business. There's the elderly Mr Fern, who keeps losing his slippers, Sylvia Satin's 13th birthday party to attend and the scintillating case of the missing bookmark to solve.

Though peace and quiet are all well and good, Betty soon finds herself longing for some cold-blooded murder.

When a bomb is dropped on a residential street, both peace and quiet are broken, and it seems the war has finally reached Sackwater. But Betty cannot stop the Hun, however hard she tries. So when the body of one of the bomb victims is found stretched out like an angel on Sackwater's beach, Betty concentrates on finding the enemy much closer to home....

©2019 M.R.C Kasasian (P)2019 Head of Zeus

Characters are simply difficult

If you edited out the ways that the main character was simply mean spirited, it would be an enjoyable book. There is nothing witty about how the protagonist approaches their frustrations; it is just endless anger expressed through snide thoughts. The main character simply sounds defeated and petulant and this makes for a difficult engagement with the story. The supporting characters are either made to seem like idiots or smarmy knuckleheads whose existence is simply to provoke the protagonist.