Kerry Greenwood, Castlemaine Murders (2003)
Good Reads meta-data is 263 pages, rated 4.06 by 5,039 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: She’ll always be Essie to me.
Tagline: The Honourable is at it again.
Miss Phryne Fisher puts the 1929 world to rights after an unpleasant discovery at a St Kilda funfair. Eventually, the piste leads her to the titular town. There is a great deal of preliminary padding of time and place and couture with many side- and backstories and little momentum through the three-quarter point but it does accelerate when finally she gets to Castlemaine.
She makes an inauspicious arrival bound and gagged in a flour sack. While thus restrained she concludes it took three men to kidnap her, the two who accosted her on the dark streets of Melbourne and another waiting in the the car to make the getaway. So the odds are three men to one against her. ‘About even then,’ she concludes and in due course she proves to be right. These men, stupid as they are, failed to remove the pistol from her silk-stocking holster, the knife concealed in her handmade shoe, or the sap in her hidden pocket. Such carelessness will have its reward.
By the time constabulary belatedly arrives she has overcome the villains, having coshed one, stabbed another, and drawn a bead on the third, or something like that.
We spent a day in Castlemaine a few years ago and found much to like in it, including das KaffeeHaus, the Buda Historic Home, and the regional Art Museum. I also bought some fine Murray Cod for dinner from ‘She Sells Sea Shells.’
These comments derive from listening to the Audible reading while on my Newtown patrols, morn and eve. At times the traffic, air, foot, and wheel, drowned out the sound, adding to the mystery.