"Death at Rainbow Cottage" by Jo Allen

A jogger out running discovers the body of a man, stabbed to death just steps from the cottage she shares with her husband. With a combination of anxiety attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder, she nearly comes unglued.

DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his Cumbria Police team are called in, and soon discover there will be nothing straightforward about the crime, including a virtual lack of suspects. The victim operated a tea shop and bakery with his sister, and the man didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world. 

 

The only suggestive thing about the murder is the location, an isolated lane known to attract both straight and gay couples. The man is discovered to have had a number of assignations there, but who they might have been with remains an unknown. 

 

Satterthwaite also has a new chief superintendent, one Faye Scanlon who may take the prize for one of the more obnoxious bosses in British crime stories. She soon has all of her people attending diversity and inclusion training seminars, taught by the husband of the jogger who found the stabbing victim. She also tells Satterthwaite rather baldly that, from her perspective, he was only promoted because he is a privileged white male. Further complicating the case is that Satterthwaite’s team includes Ashleigh O’Halloran, Satterthwaite’s current girlfriend who just happened to have had an affair with Scanlon at their previous posting in Cheshire.

 

Jo Allen

In the fourth Jude Satterthwaite mystery, Death at Rainbow Cottage, British author Jo Allen pulls in the sub-themes of gender and identity. And I will be straightforward here – I was fully expecting a stereotype ending with the killer being your caricature of a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. What kept me reading was, first, the quality of the writing, and second, the ambivalence implied about the training seminars. It would have been easy for Allen to have tipped into the kind of story expected with the themes she’s exploring, but she avoids it. Instead, she ends up focusing on telling a good story, and she succeeds at doing so.

 

Allen is a native of Wolverhampton, England, and has graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and earth science. After a career as an economic consultant, she began writing short stories, romance, and romantic suspense under the pen name of Jennifer Young. She began writing the DCI Satterthwaite crime novels in 2017.  

 

Related:

 

Death by Dark Waters by Jo Allen.

 

Death at Eden’s End by Jo Allen. 

 

Death on Coffin Lane by Jo Allen.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Limehouse Hole Stairs and the Breach – A London Inheritance.

 

On the Beat with PC Lew Tassell Again – Spitalfields Life. 

 

The true darkness of classic crime – Frances Lasok at The Critic Magazine.

 

Scattering my father’s ashes in the Camino de Santiago – Gus Carter at The Spectator.

 

A Sonnet for St. Luke’s Day – Malcolm Guite.