...this was quintessential England. Inward-looking, still licking the wounds of war, keeping the flag flying and hoping that Life Was Getting Better. [p. 105]
Rural England in 1953: Hugo Hawksworth, former intelligence officer, is confined to desk work following an injury. With his 13-year-old sister Georgia, he moves to the little town of Selchester to work on 'statistics' (which are clearly nothing of the kind) and is accommodated at the Castle, once the home of the Earl of Selchester but now inhabited, since the Earl's mysterious disappearance in a blizzard nearly seven years ago, by his niece Freya and a number of staff.
New evidence suggests that the Earl's disappearance is not as mysterious as all that, at least to one or more of the guests he'd invited to dinner on the night he vanished. Someone knows what really happened, but who? Hugo, Georgia and Freya -- with able assistance from Mrs Partridge, the housekeeper, and Hugh's uncle Leo -- navigate a maze of clues, red herrings, random discoveries and improbable revelations to discover what really happened on that winter night.
I bought this, some time ago, because I'm a great admirer of Elizabeth Edmondson's Mountjoy novels (2005 review, 2014 review) which were published under the name of Elizabeth Pewsey: she also wrote as Elizabeth Aston. I didn't find A Man of Some Repute quite as likeable as the Mountjoy books (perhaps because of the lack of that vague tinge of the supernatural that I found so intriguing; perhaps because Hugh, the protagonist, is somewhat opaque) but I'm keeping the other two novels in this trilogy in reserve for when I want cosy crime, rural England and interesting characters. Though it has to be said that the villains here are rather more stereotypical than in the author's other works.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 01 JUN 2015, prompt 'outside' -- I read most of it in the garden on a sunny Sunday morning.
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