The Ghost of Artemus Strange (The Batch Magna Chronicles)

by Peter Maughan

Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does...

Sir Humphrey has offered to play Father Christmas at the local hospital, but disaster strikes when he realises he won’t be able to buy the sack of toys he’d promised the children.

Rupert, a gentleman of the road, is found asleep in an old car in the Hall’s coach house. He is scrubbed up and given a room at the Hall, where two guests are already staying: a businessman and his rather young female companion. When money goes missing from their bedroom, Rupert is accused, and Miss Wyndham, the village’s amateur sleuth, decides to investigate the matter.

Meanwhile, local author Phineas Cook has come up with the idea of a resident ghost at the Hall to attract paying guests. All goes smoothly until the ghostly actors spend too long in the pub one evening and their performance descends into sword-wielding chaos.

As always in Batch Magna, events somehow manage to turn out all right in the end – but in the most unexpected manner…

• ISBN10: 1788421353
• ISBN13: 9781788421355
• Publish Date: 22 August 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Prelude Books
• Imprint: Farrago
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Ghost of Artemus Strange is the 5th Batch Magna book by Peter Maughan. Due out 22nd Aug 2019 from Prelude on their Farrago imprint, it's 320 pages and will be available in ebook and paperback formats.

This is a humorous nostalgic ensemble novel written around the inhabitants of a fictitious village on the border between England and Wales. There are several returning characters, Sir Humph, who's a distant American cousin of a scion branch of the manor family who inherits the title unexpectedly, his wife Clem, Bill Sikes (a canine), and others.

Despite being the 5th book in the series, it works quite well as a standalone. I had no trouble following the gently meandering plot. There's not a lot of dramatic tension although there's a strange interlude involving the London criminal underclasses in the middle of the book. Mostly it's a wryly written bucolic village pastiche with (very) eccentric players.

The book is written with British slang and idiom, so readers from elsewhere should be prepared for that. I didn't find it onerous at all; everything is clear from context. Readers who have enjoyed other nostalgic village pastiches (Miss Read's Fairacre and Thrush Green spring to mind) will most likely enjoy this one as well. It is less openly sarcastic than Watson's Flaxborough chronicles, but still in roughly the same vein.

Four stars. Enjoyable read for fans of British village slice-of-life novels.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.