Wicked Autumn: A Max Tudor Novel

It appears to be a quiet English Village with lots of traditions and life centering around the pub and the church - and it is - but the personal and family tragedies behind the scenes stretch out to many countries and many walks of life. Even a backwater can be a boiling kettle of all the emotions, and the job of their nearly-new rector is to try to make peace, provide comfort, and it turns out, to solve a murder.

The good Father Tudor burnt out when he lost his partner to a terrorist bomb, and he is converted to an active spiritual life in the devastation of that loss. But the murder of the most disliked woman in the village, both rich and domineering, both piques his old professional curiosity and needs solving for the good of the parish.

There are a sufficient number of possibilities to keep the story full of twists and turns, and a lot of emotional happenings without a lot of explicit sex or violence.

I'll be interested to read the next in the series.

I enjoyed Wicked Autumn as a social satire more than as a mystery. The writing is witty and observations about current culture very to the point. The village characters are well drawn and catty. My interest began to drag because the novel concentrates more on the secondary characters than on the mystery of Wanda's death. I would have liked more action. This is a true armchair mystery because the main character, the Vicar, spends most of the book sitting down taking the secondary characters back through the day of the murder. Like Malliet's other books, the solution seems forced at the end and unrelated to most of the events or characters in the story. Great narrator.

A wonderful cozy style mystery with a modern touch. Ex-MI5 agent Max Tudor is world weary. He turns to the cloth, and finds that even in the most quiet of hamlets, murder and chaos preside. As the new Vicar in the sleepy hamlet of Nether Monkslip, all is definitely not as it seems... A fun and engaging listen.

Cozy, Easy, Funny

Agatha Raisin Series- English village and the cast of characters

Crystal clear pronounciation and well timed pauses made for easy listening.

Yes but toward the end I forced myself to turn it off because I didn't want the book to end.

AUDIBLE- Please ask for more of GM Malliet's books be made into Audiobooks.

a propos nothing, she said heavy-handedly, as it were...

Listening to this, I suspect the prose will be better in future instalments - Malliet has other novels under her belt. And the humour in this village cozy-spoof warrants a download of the next novel in the series. If, however, you're choosing between print and audio format for this first Max Tutor outing, I think print would be better: Narration draws attention to the wordiness.

Page is not a favourite narrator with me, but he is OK here, and he gets the tone just right for this one, including the inside-cozy jokes.

Wicked Autumn is a lovely British cozy mystery, set in a small village with interesting, eccentric characters, with a rather novel sleuth -- an ex MI-5 agent who is now an Anglican priest. The characters are engaging, the plot keeps you interested, and you do really care about these people.

It is so nice to see a new writer of the cozy mystery. May she write many, many more.

Michael Page, as usual, does a smashing job as narrator.

I am a huge fan of G.M. Malliet. I would definitely try another book. Have greatly enjoyed the ones I have read.

Totally switched. Falling Glass. Adrian McKinty. Gerard Doyle a perfect voice for the story.

He has a lovely voice, just not suitable for this book. Lovely and too plummy! Seems to miss highlights of humor which this author is good at.

Not sure the main character is interesting enough.

I am sorry that the initial book on Audible from this author is a disappointment. I am a fan of her other books and am hoping that there will be more on Audible. A more suitable performer who could emphasize the humor and the spitefulness of some of her characters would be recommended.

Wicked Autumn ranks among the top half of all the audiobooks to which I have listened.

I loved the feel of being amongst the inhabitants of a small English village.

I found Max Tudor to be the most compelling character of the story as well as my favorite narration of a character by Michael Page.

I did not listen to this book all in one sitting. I spread it out over a few exercise sessions.

Waiting impatiently for the release of the second book in this series.

Yes, liked the characters.

Complicated plot, took me a while to guess who did it.

Life to the characters.

Yes From G.M. Malliet, no from Michael Page.

The plot was enjoyable and the premise of a former-MI5-agent-turned-village-priest as the setting for a murder mystery felt fresh.

The narrator raced through portions of the book, as if he were being paid a bonus for getting through the whole thing faster. He downplayed the humor of the novel, and the modulation of his read made it difficult to listen to for more than a few minutes at a time.