ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – I Died at Fallow Hall by Bonnie Burke-Patel
I Died at Fallow Hall by Bonnie Burke-Patel is published by Bedford Square Publishers and available now in hardcover, eBook and audiobook. My thanks to the author for very kindly sending me a copy for review.
Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything sheβs spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides.
But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted.
With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna.
Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice.
As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI Mistry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself β all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today.
I Died at Fallow Hall is a modern day country house murder mystery and I am always here for one of those. I love a country house book and the blurb for this one had me hooked pretty much immediately.
Fallow Hall is clinging on to its heyday. Like many others, it now opens to the public although I definitely got the sense it’s one of the smaller houses of its kind. Anna Deerin lives in an attached cottage, working as a gardener. As a former ballerina she’s used to being in control and so when she digs up the bones of a woman in the garden it brings an element of chaos to her life and makes her quiet existence more open to invasion.
The story is told in the present day from the points of view of Anna and Hitesh, the local DI tasked to the case, interspersed with sections from 1967 following the then daughter of Fallow Hall. There are no chapters, but there are plenty of section breaks, and the narrative flows really well. It sometimes took me a moment to work out whose perspective I was reading in the present day but I very quickly gelled with it.
It’s an engaging read. I particularly enjoyed learning more about the hall and gardens, and Anna’s quiet life tending to the land and selling her wares at the local market. It offers an enticing look at country life whilst also providing a mystery to be solved. The author does a really good job at keeping the solution just out of reach, with a sense of knowing the answer but not how to get to it. Also depicted well is the small village mentality and how it copes with an isolated young woman and an Asian detective, both portrayed as something of a novelty to the local residents.
Interesting characters and a fascinating setting meant I very much enjoyed this contemplative novel from Bonnie Burke-Patel, with its underlying tension simmering away until the identity of the woman was revealed. A great debut!
Born and raised in South Gloucestershire, Bonnie Burke-Patel studied History at Oxford. After working for half a decade in politics and policy, she changed careers and became a preschool teacher, before beginning to write full time. She lives with her husband, son, and needy cat in south east London, and is working on her next crime novel about fairy tales, desire, and the seaside.
