Death at Sandy Bay

A Sukey Reynolds Mystery, Book 13

By: Betty Rowlands

Narrated by: Rosamund Hine

Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's Summary

A manor house hotel, a musical weekend...and a mysterious murder?

Spring has arrived in the Bristol countryside, and Sukey Reynolds is enjoying the fine weather and lovely views from her quaint apartment. She has found love with an intrepid crime reporter, and they are busy planning a romantic weekend in London. During her time away, she is determined to avoid any more amateur sleuthing.

But life is never quiet for Sukey, and one night before her holiday, she is summoned to the charming Dallington Manor, a country house hotel nestled on the coast in Sandy Bay. She arrives at the starlit grounds to find a terrible tragedy has occurred. Lance Rainbird, a guest at a weekend gathering, has been discovered murdered in the lake.

Her superiors close in on a suspect, the man who hosted the party, but Sukey can’t shake the feeling that they’ve got this case completely wrong. During her weekend in the city, she follows a hunch, pokes around Rainbird’s house, and finds an address book that might just be the golden ticket to clearing an innocent man and nailing the true villain.

As Sukey examines Rainbird’s acquaintances, she finds old flames, combative colleagues, and an estranged brother, but no one with an obvious motive for murder. He had a reputation for being difficult, but who could have wanted him dead? Then, Sukey finds a name in the address book that shouldn’t be there. Suddenly, she knows who the killer is, but can she convince her boss he’s got the wrong suspect before it’s too late?

If murder mysteries by Agatha Christie, Faith Martin, and Joy Ellis have you gripped, then you’ll love this twisty whodunit from the queen of cozy crime!

This book was previously published as The Scent of Death.

©2019 Betty Rowlands (P)2019 Bookouture

Dectective Sukey

I still miss her son! A son I might add that she was very close to and now never even speaks to!!

Not to my taste

Unbelievable story, lots of flannel, read by a narrator who sounds like mr chumley-Warner’s other half. Dreadful accents and very odd delivery.

Disappointing narration

I have previously listened to the early Sukey stories when she was a CSI and the first when she became a DC. I skipped to the last of the series to see what the author had decided to do with her. The story is OK, but the characters are insipid compared to the earlier stories. The biggest disappointment though is the narration. It is so wooden. Most of the time the story sounds as if it were being read for the first time by someone who has just learned to read aloud. There is little sense of flow and there are often inappropriate pauses. The long pause between a character speaking and then a 'She said' or similar phrase is particularly grating. The narrator is clearly able to inject feeling and flow because she occasionally does so, but otherwise I could almost imagine the text was being read by a text-to-speech computer.