Murder in the Village

By: Faith Martin

Narrated by: Gemma Dawson

Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's Summary

Looking for a brilliant best-selling murder mystery with a feisty female detective? Then meet DI Hillary Greene, a policewoman struggling to save her career and catch criminals.

A would-be politician is found battered to death in the kitchen of his expensive home in a lovely Oxfordshire village. His wife’s alibi is full of holes, and there’s another woman in the background. And what about his seemingly mild-mannered political rival? 

DI Hillary Greene tries to get to the bottom of this perplexing murder. She certainly doesn’t think the prime suspect is as guilty as everyone thinks. Just as she’s about to make a breakthrough, everything is turned upside down by a fatal development in another case she is working on....

Can Hillary find the murderer, and will she survive a brush with one of Oxford’s most dangerous criminals? 

Murder in the Village is the fourth in a series of pause-resisting crime thrillers set in Oxfordshire. 

©2017 Faith Martin (P)2018 Tantor Audio

Poor

There really is no other way to describe the narration of this book. The person sounds disinterested and hurried with only the saving grace being the dialogue sections. The only way I can get through is by slowing down the speed on the app. Shame because I always enjoy the characters and stories of these books.

Repetition ruins a decent story

I’m afraid I’m going to steer clear of Faith Martin’s D I Greene novels for a while. The stories themselves aren’t the issue so much as her excessive use of adverbs and frequent repetition of words, often within a sentence. I can’t believe an editor wouldn’t have picked up on this rather irritating habit.
This story starts with the eponymous “Murder in the Village” - I think the original title of By a Narrow Majority is better- of a prospective Tory candidate, who is almost forgotten for the rest of the book. The bulk of the story is then taken up with a drugs raid gone bad and the ramifications from said raid. I thought the resolution of both the murder and drugs raid a bit trite but preferable to an open ending which is really annoying.
Her protagonists are often no more than thumbnail sketches or stereotypes and as crime fiction is quite a crowded field I shall read more Rankin, Billingham, Slaughter et al for a while..They share a better ear for dialogue and have more fully developed characters.

narration vastly improved

at last the narrator got very little wrong which made the book very enjoyable as it should be