Faith, Fiction, Friends: "Murder by Fire" by Faith Martin

Thursday, May 11, 2023

"Murder by Fire" by Faith Martin

We know that the murderer is a woman with blond hair. We know that the crime was committed in anger and rage. We know the dead man was religious to a fault; he seemed to model his faith on that of the Biblical Pharisees. And we know the crime extended to gathering up many of his books and papers and setting them afire in a large pile in the neatly kept garden.

What we don’t know is why the victim’s body was added to the fire. And almost all of the potential suspects have blond hair.

That’s the investigating dilemma that DI Hillary Greene and her team face in Murder by Fire, the tenth mystery in the Hillary Greene series by British writer Faith Martin. Each of the team members are also dealing with their own personal dilemmas – a lover moving to Australia, a demand for inside police information or one’s parents will suffer, and a partner who’s becoming a baron because of the death of a relative – which will make Greene’s sergeant an official Lady. And Greene herself has a departing superintendent who is determined he’s going to find something to bring Greene down.

Faith Martin

But the team plugs away, doing the grunt work of talking to neighbors, business associates, lawyers, and family, talking to each other, bouncing ideas around, and slowly a picture begins to emerge. And then something will click.

In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.

Murder by Fire is another fine entry in the Hillary Greene series. Martin has a gift for making her characters real and flawed, and it’s often a combination of strengths and flaws that solve the crimes.