annieb123's Review of Murder is in the Air (Kate Shackleton Mystery, #12)

by Frances Brody

Frances Brody's twelfth Kate Shackleton mystery will positively intoxicate fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Nicola Upson.

A competition for the crown proves deadly when confidences are betrayed and secrets are spilled.

North Yorkshire, 1930. It's the season for warm and spirited countryside celebrations. Ever since the war, pubs have been in the doldrums, and in an attempt to promote and breathe new life back into the business, brewers select a charismatic employee as local queen--to be the face of their industry. And this year's queen, wages clerk Ruth Parnaby, has invited the ever intrepid Kate Shackleton and her niece Harriet to accompany her on public engagements at a garden party thrown in her honor. But when Ruth leads children to the stables for pony rides, the drayman is missing, later found in the last place imaginable--the fermentation room, deceased.

What looked to be a simple case of asphyxiation in the dangerous fermentation room is quickly clarified by the pathologist as murder--the drayman was already dead before he was taken into the room. Someone was looking to cover it up. The horse dealer who sold the pony to the drayman comes under suspicion, but more and more Ruth's nasty father, Slater Parnaby's strong motive to dissuade his daughter from any festivities lingers in Kate's mind, despite his having an alibi. The case is muddy, at best, and it's going to take Kate at her keenest to decipher the truth.

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Murder is in the Air is the 12th Kate Shackleton historical cozy by Frances Brody. Released 6th Oct 2020 by Crooked Lane Books, it's 316 pages and available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.
This is a gently written, engaging historical (1930s) mystery series set in England. This entry sees Kate and her partner investigating a series of incidents at a brewery in Yorkshire. I love the slow paced golden-age interwar classic feel of these mysteries and this one fits in well. For new readers, it works very well as a standalone; the author is adept at providing backstory in context without info-dumping.

There's a quite impressive verisimilitude. There has clearly been a prodigious amount of research behind the setting and workings of an English brewery of the time, and it shows. The plot is character driven and their interactions as they learn about one another and their interrelationships both past and present allow Kate to disentangle all the plot threads and turn them into a cohesive whole by the end of the book. The denouement was somewhat melancholy for me. Sometimes (most of the time?) there's no perfect "happily ever after" and this is true here as well.

I highly recommend the series as a whole, and this entry specifically to any readers who enjoy golden age interwar classic mysteries in the British style. The writing, plotting, and pacing will draw inevitable comparisons with Josephie Tey and Christie amongst the period selections, as well as Nicola Upson and Imogen Robertson's modern period pieces. This is one series I really look forward to, and this particular offering compares favorably with earlier volumes in the series.

Four stars

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

Murder is in the Air (Kate Shackleton Mystery, #12)

by Frances Brody

Reviewed by annieb123 on Oct 10, 2020

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