Murder in the Mist

Peter and Georgia Marsh #5

by Amy Myers

A Peter and Georgia Marsh Mystery. With Fernbourne Manor to be opened as an arts centre, ex-cop Peter Marsh and his daughter Georgia are making enquiries about the Fernbourne Five, who came to fame in the late 1930s, famous for their artistic work and for the doomed love affair between Elfie Lane and Alwyn Field and the tragic death of the brilliant poet Roy Sandford. But when Peter and Georgia begin to make enquiries about Alwyn Field, they are met with inexplicable hostility . . .

Genres: Mystery

214 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

aka Laura Daniels, Harriet Hudson

Amy Myers was born in Kent, where she still lives, although she has now ventured to the far side of the Medway. For many years a director of a London publishing company, she is now a full-time writer. Married to an American, she lived for some years in Paris, where, surrounded by food, she first dreamed up her Victorian chef detective Auguste Didier. Currently she is writing her contemporary crime series starring Jack Colby, car detective, and in between his adventures continuing her Marsh & Daughter series and her Victorian chimnney sweep Tom Wasp novels.

Series:
* Peter and Georgia March
* Auguste Didier
* Tom Wasp

Anthologies edited:
* After Midnight Stories

Reviews

[Pdamon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read half of this excruciatingly slow moving book. It is full of characters that are so interwoven, I practically needed an excel sheet. But no action. None. I finally just read the last 4 pages to get the who dunnit.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is definitely growing on me. I like the main characters, Georgia and Peter Marsh. The characters in this mystery were harder to keep track of, there were a lot of moving parts and relationships.

Georgia and her father, Peter, write books about unsolved mysteries, after they solve them. In this case, they feel that a poet that committed suicide in the late 1940s. They spend a lot of time figuring out if it was murder or suicide and them if what other characters were doing with each other. Take notes in the beginning.

[Sandra Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy this author and this was a good read but the subject was not of real interest to me. It revolved around a group of poets and artists and there was a lot of time spent on the background of the group and not enough on the mystery itself.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

2008 The Marshes are investigating The Fernbourne Five, a group of artists from the 1930s-1950s, and the apparent suicide of one of them. Is there a link with the murder of Damien Trent, a young man that Georgia Marsh spoke to recently.
An entertaining mystery.

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murder in the Mist could be Amy Myers' best book so far in the series. In it, Peter and Georgia Marsh stumble onto a mystery by pure chance. The pair get lost driving through the Kentish countryside and sense "a fingerprint of time" at a stream adjacent to an abandoned cottage. The Marshes discover that the cottage had been used by a Bloomsbury-style collection of writers and artists known as the Fernbourne Five. One of them, poet Alwyn Field, hung himself at the spot in 1949. But the Marshes begin to suspect that murder, not suicide, led to Field's untimely end.

The novel recreates the bohemian lifestyle of artists before World War II, and the novel will keep you guessing to the end as to who killed Alwyn Field. Myers resists the temptation to turn Georgia and her father into paragons of virtue. Georgia is terribly human, making mistakes and saying things without thinking at times. Her father Peter can be brusque and unreasonable. While Murder in the Mist is still definitely a cozy, I admire that Myers adds that bit of realism to Peter and Georgia Marsh.

As always happens when the father-daughter duo investigate, secrets from the past lead to murders very much in the present. The book always plays fair with the clues; even so, the resolution will come as a great surprise.

Longtime fans of the series will be pleased with advances in the relationship between commitment-shy Georgia and her publisher and lover Luke Frost.

Kudos to Myers for providing another delicious British cozy. I devoured the book in two days' time. I'm going to immediately embark on the next one in the series, Murder Takes the Stage.

[Amy Paget · Rating 1 out of 5]

NOT an entry to read without starting at the beginning of the Marsh and Daughter mysteries. Paranormal 'footprints in time' seem to initiate each case, but are not well-enough described in this novel for it to stand on its own. Unfortunately did not pique my interest enough to dig up the series entry, The Wickenham Murders