"Death on the Lake" by Jo Allen

Twin 18-year-old boys awaken on a sailboat in a lake in Cumbria. They’ve had something of a drunken, drugged spree with a girl working at a local marina. When they can’t find the girl, they look overboard. And there her body is, floating beneath the surface. Their response: avoid the wrath of their father and hide the body. 

The body is eventually found, and it looks to the police and everyone else concerned that it’s an accidental drowning. That is, except for the girl’s clothes folded neatly and hidden from view. Would a drunken girl actually do that, when she was known for keeping a messy room?

 

Jo Allen

There’s a second death that looks natural or accidental, but Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite isn’t convinced. And then there’s an outright murder. Everything seems to point in the direction of the 18-year-old twins’ family, but Satterthwaite is stopped by his book. It seems the paterfamilias is being investigated for financial fraud, and nothing can be done to alarm the man or make his suspicious.

 

Death on the Lake is the fifth DCI Jude Satterthwaite mystery novel by British author Jo Allen. Full of unexpected twists and turns, the story moves rapidly to a rather dramatic conclusion. Allen also does a nice job of interweaving the main characters personal stories (that is, love lives) into the major movement of the novel.

 

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.

 

Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Tiny Acts of Analog Resistance – Seth Haines at Life Examined. 

 

The repaganization of the West – Ed West at Wrong Side of History.

Le Republique’s Last, Best Hope – Christophe Guilluy at The Free Press.

 

Light and Shadows at Franklin Battlefield – Chris Heisey at Emerging Civil War.

"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.

"Death on Coffin Lane" by Jo Allen

It’s a mystery with an overlay of William Wordsworth. 

Cody Wilder is an American academic staying for some months at Grasmere, the home town of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. She has made a significant discovery with some letters relating to Wordsworth and his sister, and she’s there to do research and give a public lecture. She also attracts, and creates, controversy, and there have been a number of online threats made against her.

 

When her English research assistant is found hanging in her cottage kitchen, apparently a suicide, Detective Chief Inspector Jude Satterthwaite of the Cumbria Police and his team handle the investigation. He takes an instant dislike to Wilder, as does the reader. She’s obnoxious at best, self-centered and opinionated, and she doesn’t think twice about lying to the police. Trying to create sympathy for her later in the story is going to fall flat; the reader won’t mind if something dastardly happens to her.

 

Then the body of a man in a nearby New Age encampment is found, more deaths are in the offing. Satterthwaite has his hands full. But the Wordsworth letters seem to be involved; someone is desperately searching for something and won’t stop at murder.

 

Jo Allen

Death on Coffin Lane is the third DCI Jude Satterthwaite mystery by British author Jo Allen. If you’re a Wordsworth fan, you’ll find yourselves treated to quotations, biographical information, literary speculation, and the atmosphere of Grasmere. 

 

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.  

 

It’s a good mystery, but the drawing of the American academic is a bit overdone. Later in the story, when some sympathy is called for, she’s burned so many bridges with the reader that little if any will be forthcoming. That said, the character of Cody Wilder is a almost stereotype of controversial academics, and stereotypes will have some element of truth contained within them. 

 

Related:

 

Death by Dark Waters by Jo Allen.

 

Death at Eden’s End by Jo Allen. 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Murders for September – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Cowboy as Detective: Finding Charlie Siringo’s West – Nathan Ward at CrimeReads.

 

BFFs: The death of Leonora – short story by Vincent Marshall at On the 12^th.

 

Year of the Monarch: The Native Wildflowers Formerly Known as Weeds – Laura Boggess at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Salisbury Cathedral prepares for final ‘topping out’ after 37 years of repairs – Steven Morris at The Guardian. 

 

Dorothy L. Sayers and the Thirty-Foot Drain: Searching for Peter Wimsey – James Benn at CrimeReads.