Nancy Atherton, 2004.
Thought this was fairly crap. It’s a cosy where the detective is snowbound in an English stately home with a few other people and investigates a theft from the past. I didn’t care for the central conceit that the ghost of Aunt Dimity talks to the heroine through a notebook, and even apart from this the plot and characters seemed implausible. Just looked at the author’s website and found a terrible greengrocer’s: “There are dozen’s of Aunt Dimitys in my life”.
Atherton also says:
“I don’t, as a rule, “create” characters. More often than not, they simply show up and start talking (bless them). I get to know them as you do, bit by bit, as the story progresses.
By the same token, I rarely plan storylines. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen before it happens—where’s the fun in that?—so I let the story unfold as I go along.”
AAAAGH.
