Death at Fournier Downs

Bow Street Duchess Mystery Series, Book 2

De: Cara Devlin

Narrado por: Allie Rose

After a murder scandal nearly sent her husband to the gallows, Audrey, the Duchess of Fournier, has retreated to the countryside to distance herself from gossip—and from the Bow Street officer who proved as irritating as he was intriguing.

But when Audrey's friend Charlotte, the Countess of Bainbury, dies mysteriously on Fournier Downs parkland, she summons the only person she trusts to uncover the truth: Principal Officer Hugh Marsden.

Ignoring the mounting friction between them, as well as Hugh's command for her to stay out of his investigation, Audrey uses her uncanny ability to read the memories of objects to discover a web of sordid local secrets. More than one unlucky lady has been caught within its deadly strands, and a single misstep in their hunt for a killer could make Audrey and Hugh the next targets.

©2023 Cara Devlin (P)2023 Tantor

Cara Devlin is AMAZING

The second instalment of Bow Street Duchess Series does not disappoint! You will root for Audrey Sinclair, the Duchess of Fournier & Bow Street Runner Detective Hugh Marsden in solving this murder mystery. Allie Rose has impeccable pacing with her narration and gives the characters depth, humour and most importantly dislike the right characters.

Great read. Perfect character development

I am so pleased to have found another series of enjoyable historical mystery novels. She does an exceptional job with the storyline as well as the characters. Looking forward to reading the next in the series.

5 Stars

This is an entertaining cozy mystery with engaging characters and an interesting plot. I look forward to the next book.

Great

Another great story! Great characters and murders with many suspects. Narration good and cannot wait for more

Good read

I like the unpredictable things that all come together to close all the story hole. I will
Be happy to read the rest of the series

Intriguing but Get the Kindle Version Instead

First, the premise of this mystery is intriguing in that it gives the reader/listener insight into the legal procedures of the early 19th century. I had known of coroners, magistrates and constables but had never really understood the distinction between their individual roles in regards to a murder investigation/inquest. I also have to admit that the inquests that were routine a couple of centuries ago seem pretty silly today.

That said, the rest of the story is fairly on brand for this genre, no real surprises or engaging characters. I had hopes that with Audrey's special psychometric abilities the story would be more enthralling. Unfortunately, that's not the case here, Hugh would have solved the mystery, and did in fact do so, without any help from Audrey's visions, which were few and not very informative. In the first novel of this series she used her gift more often and it was an integral part of finding clues that led the duo to solving the murders.

I liked Hugh a lot and found his character to be well rounded and fully fleshed out. By contrast, Audrey comes across, at least to me, as bored and in need of a purpose in life. Her character is guarded and aloof but not due to her station as a duchess but to her need to keep her secrets. She calls for a Bow Street Officer that she trusts, Hugh, to investigate the death of her friend, and yet, for some unfathomable reason, she must go rushing off to ask questions about others' secrets. Admittedly, she's looking into murders and believes she has valid reasons to ask those questions, but she is so heavy handed, that she rarely gets any useful information. Which leads me back to my main point that Audrey is almost superfluous to the investigation. While she does contribute some key intelligence, those clues would have been found in due course anyway.

I find Ms. Devlin's style of writing off-putting, especially in the beginning of chapters. She has the method of interspersing core facts, back story, descriptions and anything else distracting she can add, in the middle of conversation, sometimes adding up to 15 minutes of narrative between a question asked and it's corresponding response. I kept losing track of the conversations as I tried to filter out the extraneous details and found myself hitting the back button quite often.

Ms. Rose's narrative, for the most part, was uninspired. It wasn't great but it wasn't awful either. The reason I went with 2 stars was her pronunciations were very odd (mulish pronounced "mullish") and she had the peculiar habit of dropping ending sounds for words. I would back track a few times, trying to comprehend what was being said and would finally just pull up the kindle version (thankfully unlimited) and read the garbled parts of the story. I'm not sure if this is due to a recording issue or if it's just an accent in the UK I haven't heard yet, but I found myself referring to the written version at least every 10 to 15 minutes (extremely inconvenient as the whole point of listening to the audio is to be active, not sitting). Eventually, I gave up on the audio and found myself reading the kindle and skipping over the irrelevant parts to finish the story.

In the end, my advice is that unless you want the audio version for a specific purpose (car ride, walking, etc), then stick with the kindle version and skim through the trivial segments and go straight to the quote marks. The book IS interesting but I was disappointed that the psychometric abilities didn't play a larger role in the story line.