Review of Deadly Plot by Jan Edwards (A Bunch Courtney Investigation Book 5)

Deadly Plot by Jan Edwards

“Digging for Victory” takes on a new meaning in the latest instalment of Jan Edwards’s Bunch Courtney Investigations series, Deadly Plot. Bunch Courtney, despite having turned down the role of consulting detective to the Sussex Constabulary, is summoned by her friend Chief Inspector White to Victory Gardens, where foxes have unearthed the body of an unknown man after vegetable thieves disturbed one of the new allotments made from the grounds of the cricket club.

The plot belongs to a newcomer to the area, Marion Cawston, a mysterious journalist whom the locals suspect of obtaining it by undue influence. The stage is set for a new investigation for Courtney and Wright, but soon it emerges that more is at stake than a dispute over stolen vegetables…

Her contemporaries might have called Bunch Courtney a “plucky gel” but she is much more than that. Trying to run what is left of the family estate at Perringham from the Dower House where her grandmother Beatrice still lives (the main house has been commandeered) Bunch is still recovering from the death of her mother, Theadora. Now 32 years old, she is also having to contend with her grandmother’s attempts to marry her off to the dashing Henry Marsham,  and the efforts of the various men in her life, from Marsham and Wright to her father, senior War Office member Sir Edward Courtney, to stop her investigating crime and getting into danger.

Whether riding her sturdy pony Perry or driving her MG, Bunch is eager to evade these attempts to run her life. She sets out to solve the mystery of the body in Victory Gardens, who turns out to be an escaped Italian POW. As Wright is called away to a more urgent case, Bunch is piqued by her curiosity and her fierce sense of justice to find out who killed the man. What she unearths has connections far from Wyncombe and its parochial affairs, and once more she ventures into danger in a world at war, where being a woman gives her no automatic protection.

Jan Edwards has pulled off another terrific episode of Bunch Courtney’s adventures. Bunch is a likeable and smart main character, torn between her duty to the family estate, the attentions of two very different men, and her passion for solving crime. She is surrounded by an ensemble of great characters, some well-known to the reader, like her widowed sister Dodo and her formidable but aging grandmother Beatrice; others new, like the shady Marion Cawston, the unctuous Reggie Tallboys and his men-only golf-club, and the CO of the prisoner-of-war camp, Hamish Campbell. Even minor characters are well fleshed-out, and once again Edwards’ gift for detail gives the story a strong sense of place and time. There has been meticulous research, but the wealth of historical detail never burdens the narrative. 

A fun read, whether or not you have met Bunch Courtney before. The sense of peril grows throughout until the story reaches a terrifying climax. By then, the list of the dead has grown, and Bunch finds herself in mortal peril as she faces a ruthless enemy who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Get Deadly Plot here – the book launches on 2nd February 2024

About Jan Edwards:

Jan Edwards is a UK author with several novels and many short stories in horror, fantasy, mainstream and crime fiction, including the Mammoth Book of Folk Horror as well as various volumes of the MX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. Jan is an editor with the award-winning Alchemy Press (includes The Alchemy Press Books of Horror series. Jan was awarded the Arnold Bennett Book Prize for Winter Downs, the first in her ww2 crime series The Bunch Courtney Investigations.

To read more about Jan go to: https://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com/

Winner of the Arnold Bennett Book Prize; Karl Edward Wagner award; Winchester Slim Volume award (for Sussex Tales). Short listed for both the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction and Best Collection.