Review: City Mouse, Country House
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 4, 2013
The best thing about this mystery is its protagonist, an American female computer programmer, whose lifestyle is about as uncharacteristic of a stock English country house cast as one can imagine. She is not worried much about how she looks, and her standard of cuisine is nonexistent. Anne Lambert's a nerd. And maybe that's the joke. Her appearance at an aristocrat's weekend party has to be contrived. The premise is barely credible: she is living in a London flat when she hears a disturbance on a neighbor's door. She meets the apparently drunken caller briefly. He is Jimmy Soames, who is found drowned in the Thames a few days later, and he may have been the one who left  a note in her mailbox warning her of her neighbor. This neighbor, Dr. John Davidson, a psychiatrist, begins to stalk her. The dead man was Honorable James Soames, Davidson's patient, and they have known each other since the boy was at boarding school near the home of his Honorable parents. Within days Anne is the victim of a hit and run accident, and the car is identified as belonging to James Soames' brother Daniel, also a drunk. All of this would be fairly ho-hum except for Anne's coworker Nick who calls her "dudette." He's a wannabee Californian.  They make a good duo for what seems to be a series. I also liked her visit to Leeds Castle, an actual landmark in Kent, where she is at the mercy of the people she mistrusts, and rightly so.Time Out Kent and Sussex (Time Out Kent & Sussex)