A Cotswold Christmas Mystery

Thea Osborne #18

by Rebecca Tope

It’s Christmas, and things are looking good at the Slocombe house. Thea’s daughter Jessica has come to stay, much to her stepdaughter Stephanie’s delight. But then things take a turn for the worse. A local family, the Frowses, find themselves increasingly harassed by an aggressive landlord. When Beverley Frowse goes missing, Thea and Stephanie both feel they should do their best to help her husband and son to solve the mystery.

Christmas Day arrives. There are presents, a turkey, and general goodwill, despite Thea’s suppressed hankering to be involved in events at the Frowses’ house, where a dead man has been discovered ...

Genres: Mystery, Christmas, Fiction, Contemporary, Crime, Cozy Mystery

352 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2020

About the author

Rebecca Tope is best known as the author of over twenty crime novels. She has also recently produced the e-book entitled 'The Indifference of Tumbleweed'. She has every intention of continuing with the murder stories, as well as a variety of other kinds of fiction.

She has experienced many different kinds of work in her time - running antenatal classes, counselling troubled couples and being an office girl for an undertaker, for example. There were also several years monitoring the output of dairy cows, as well as every sort of task associated with book publishing. In 1992, she founded Praxis Books, a small British press.

She lives surrounded by trees she has planted herself, tending her own sheep.

Reviews

[Sherrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A generous 2 stars for this non story, nothing much happens with these odd, very bizarre families, throw in a few completely pointless characters, a precocious child, a dead body and an unbelievable ending. Definitely won't bother again!

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this, number 18 in the series, Thea and her family are getting ready for Christmas. She is concerned about a friend, Ant Frowse, who lives nearby. The Frowse family live in a tied cottage on land now owned by hostile landlords. The harassment, intended to Induce them to leave, has worsened since the landlord's marriage to Carla, a Russian woman with three daughters, two of whom have arrived for Christmas and who are now menacing Ant and his father. Meanwhile, his mother has gone off for an unspecified reason just before Christmas, and his only reassurance that she is safe is a fragmentary phone call while she was on a low battery, cut off just as she was saying something that alarmed him. Her departure may be connected with a row with the landlord who accused her of intercepting a parcel containing a valuable gold necklace, a present for Carla. Then a body is found in suspicious circumstances, drawing suspicion on the Frowse family.

As usual, Thea wants to be involved, something her family, especially husband Drew, resists. He has his own problems when his estranged mother contacts him the day before Christmas Eve to tell him his father just died and she wants him to visit on Christmas Eve.

The story was rather slow moving and a bit repetitive, especially Ant continually fretting about his mum and her cryptic phone call. However, there’s a nicely portrayed family dynamic with his father being infuriatingly obtuse and cryptic himself, for good reason as it later transpires. I wasn't quite convinced by the denouement, but despite the tensions in Thea's marriage it was nice to see her developing a good relationship with her smart and precocious stepdaughter. Drew continues to irritate a bit: he used to involve himself in crime-solving in the original West Country series that merged with this one but has now become a bit of an old fogey. I did find it a bit incredible that the (offscreen) Detective Chief Inspector rang Thea to appraise her of developments, and it was a little unsatisfying that the mystery is solved by another character, not Thea.

On balance I would rate this at 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book in January and came back to it in December to read the final chapter. I’d made it 2/3 through the book and was sick of the repetitive storyline of every character getting filled in with what was going on, over and over. I as a reader already know, why do I have to keep hearing it!? So I skipped to the the end where the mystery is spelled out on the last couple of pages.
Not sure I’d pick up another Trope book after this disappointing read.

[H. Daley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much too long winded with a vaguely unsatisfactory end.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while to get into this one but eventually it was good .

[Pepperoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was hard to get into but I ended up enjoying it surprisingly much. The conversations and internal monologues reminded me of the “Guy waking up in saw trap if Saw was British: right. what’s all this then” meme, which was delightful.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Christmas is coming to the picturesque Cotswold countryside and Thea Slocombe and her family are looking forward to the fesitivies, though things soon take a turn for the worse.

"A local family, the Frowses, find themselves increasingly harassed by an aggressive landlord and his overbearing wife. When Beverly Frowse suddenly goes missing without a trace, Thea feels she should help to investigate, if only to help ease the concern of Beverly's son, Ant. Christmas day arrives and amid the traditional trimmings, Thea is hankering to be involved in the mystery . . . and then a dead body is discovered nearby."
~~back flap

Interesting plot, with several sub-motifs that, of course, all come together at the end. Lovely description of an English Christmas, with the obligatory ongoing dilemmas of the newly blended family.

[Nola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I picked this because I wanted to read about the Cotswolds at Christmas [more than I really cared about a mystery.] It turns out that it wasn't much of a mystery - to me it seemed kind of muddled in the last few pages of the book. I did appreciate that the 11 year old girl figured out a key part of the mystery. This is the only book I've picked up of the series and maybe, to be fair, I would have enjoyed it better if I was more familiar with the characters or more invested in the series.

[Judith Cranswick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great story in this series.
Lovers of the cosy mystery will be delighted to find that A Cotswold Christmas Mystery – book 16 in Rebecca Tope’s Cotswold Mysteries series – fits all the criteria of the genre. No gratuitous bad language, graphic sex or violence but lots of puzzles to solve complete with plenty of red herrings to lead you in the wrong direction.
Fast moving, full of twists and turns to make you want to keep turning the page, fascinating characters (Stephanie, Drew’s thirteen-year-old daughter is a pure delight), with justice for all at the end, what’s not to like?

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have done with a more editing. There’s a lot of unnecessary content. It took a long time to start caring about the characters.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read a book in this long-running series for a while, and things have moved on quite a bit for house-sitter Thea, who is now married to Drew Slocombe, a local undertaker who she presumably met through her 2nd job (her first is house-sitting) as an unofficial detective! No house-sitting in this book, instead Thea, Drew and his 2 children from his first marriage (he's a widower) are getting ready for Christmas and awaiting the arrival of Thea's daughter from her first marriage. Trouble breaks out when a local woman, who is a friend of Thea's, goes missing, and when the body of the local landlord, on whose land the woman and her family were tenants, is found dead in very suspicious circumstances, things don't look too good for Thea's friend. So Thea and her stepdaughter, 10 year old Stephanie, decide to try to find out what is going on. Not surprisingly this ruffles a few feathers, not least from the dead man's wife and her daughters from her first marriage. It's an easy enough read, but I didn't find the way it was told primarily through the eyes of a child very convincing, this child was more like 10 years old going on about 50! Other things didn't make sense either, mainly that surely if the dead man had been electrocuted, wouldn't there have been marks on his body? So a comfort read for Christmas, but nothing particularly special. 6/10

[Chrystyna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Cotswold Christmas Mystery by Rebeca Tope - OK

The next of my own bookish advent calendar (*)

I don't usually pick up a book mid-series but as it fitted in with the festive theme I gave it a go.

Thea Slocombe and her family are settling in for Christmas in their little village in the Cotswolds, but there's trouble brewing. A local family are being harrassed by their landlord/local landowner. Being steadily pushed to the brink in the hope they'll leave rather than going through the hassle of evicting them. It all comes to a head when a body is found. As Thea has helped the police before (and this is where dropping into a series is a bit of a mistake - no background to draw upon) she picks up on both local gossip and the progress of the case and soon gets drawn into helping solve the crime.

Found it a bit tame and predictable compared with other series that I've read, but it was a quick and easy read and enjoyable enough. Lets just say that I won't be searching out any more of this series

(*) every year I collect interesting looking Christmas themed books, wrap them up and then pick them at random during December. I never know what I'm going to get and I have some sweet treats wrapped for non-book days. Works for me!


#review

[Ann Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very slow paced mystery set in the beautiful Cotswolds of England at Christmas. The characters were not very likable and the plot not well structured and generally did not make sense. The setting of the Cotswolds at Christmas was definitely the most desirable part of this story.

A wealthy man is found murdered on his Cotswolds estate. The main suspects are the former groundskeeper and his family that live on the estate after it was sold to the current owner. The reader discovers an intense feud between the accused tenants and the murdered land owner and his vicious Russian wife and evil daughters. The tenants wife mysteriously just disappears at Christmas at the same time as the land owner is murdered fueling the mystery and placing more suspicion on the tenants. Family friends become involved to help solve the mystery and remove suspicion from their friends but the facts do not seem likely.

[Sheila · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well I finished it so perhaps two stars or 1.5. I was exhausted with all the repetitive dialogue. Endlessly going over and over the storyline. Stephanie, 11 years old going on 85, her brother aged 9, and more like. 5 year old, father Drew, morose probably due to his work, Thea likely the most normal and Jessica, her daughter, awkward and officious. As for the ‘Russian ‘ family, they were a caricature of a caricature! Digby and his son Ant? What’s the mystery? It was written in a style reminiscent of old English with flowery descriptions at times. This book doesn’t want to make me read more by this author.

[Diana Jaques · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand that this is a mystery but Christmas is as much as the theme and anything else and I just think it could have been expressed better.

I was on the verge of giving up on this book but I have to admit there was something underlying that made me continue. I got to page 62 and all of a sudden my interest started to grow.

I'm not going to lie, I did see the events coming. There is just something off and I can't quite put my finger on it.

I still think people should give this book ago, because at the end of the day it is just my opinion.
It's the Cotswolds at Christmas with a sprinkle of mystery after all.

[Jane Flynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first book by this author that I’ve read, and while I quite enjoyed it it soon became obvious it was part of a series, and as such there were certain references that were unfamiliar to me which meant it took me a while to get into the story. I may have appreciated the book more had I read some more of this series previously. Having said that, it was an enjoyable read with an unusual theme and cast of characters. I’d recommend it, but maybe start at the beginning of the series first.

[Lori Ruthford · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a selection that someone in my book club picked. It might have held my interest more if I had read the other books in the series. As a stand-alone read, it lacked in many ways. The plot just plodded along without much suspense holding the reader to it. It would have helped to have the back stories of the characters, but since I was unaware that this was part of a series, I had a small window of insight. None of the characters shone brightly. Humdrum is my best descriptive word for this book.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read and enjoyed books by this author in the past but this one baffled me! Stephanie, a precocious 11 year old seems to dominated this book and not in a good way! I wondered if this was aimed at the young adult market as it seemed a bit tame to me. Drew, a lovely character from previous books featured less in this and when he did appear he was a bit on the boring side. I did finish it but found it hard going as there was very little to keep me interested.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as I was holiday in the Cotswolds at the time, so it felt like an appropriate read. I really liked it and felt it had an Agatha Christie feel about it, so a lovely murder mystery read. I am going to start at the beginning of the series at some point as I am keen to read about Thea's whole story.

[Vanessa Boyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was another lovely one and what it was lovely that it included perspectives from Stephanie and Percy as well as just Thea. It was more about the family and their dynamics than solving a murder and so that made it a bit different in a good way.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this book incredibly hard work and confusing start to finish. There were so many characters, none of whom I found remotely interesting.
It was a lesson in dysfunctional families from landed gentry to unwanted tenants on their land.

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Speed read a lot of this book and it didn’t seem to make a difference so full of unnecessary padding. Almost half the book gone before the crime revealed and last pages rushed. Not the best from this author.

[Daniela Boulègue · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the characters very strange, acting not according to their age. Endless descriptions of people's thoughts turning in their head repeated several times. Slow story with plenty of side strings completely irrelevant to the plot. Most boring book of 2025.

[JenniferB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a good example in this series, some new characters introduced. Although actual plot of the mystery is nothing special, a bit convoluted.

[Susan Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have read all of Rebecca Tope's books and this was not one of the best.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one more than the others in the series since Thea met Drew.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually enjoy her books but this was a bit too convoluted.

[Zoe MacIver · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars 🌟

Despite the fact I thought this was a standalone and not book 17 in a series, I really enjoyed this. Slightly unsatisfied with the ending but otherwise this was good. Loved Stephanie

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit confusing to jump into the series at this point but I love a Christmas mystery. This was not disappointing once I got my bearings.

[Nicola Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as the previous books in the series. Thea didn't really solve this one and therefore I found it meandered for a long time before anything happened.