Thanks NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for my Advanced copy of Mortmain Hall by Martin Edwards. If you’d like to learn more about Martin Edwards and his writing, his website is www.martinedwardsbooks.com. If you’d like more information on Mortmain Hall, I will point you to Edwards’ blog at http://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2020/04/mortmain-hall-publication-day.html.
Mortmain Hall was on offer from NetGalley and, totally engaged by the synopsis, I downloaded it for a nice read. Oh, man, was this book not at all what I expected it to be. Let’s start with the synopsis (from amazon.com):
“…But Rachel Savernake is not one of the mourners. She hopes to save a life – the life of a man who is supposed to be cold in the grave. But then a suspicious death on the railway track spurs her on to investigate a sequence of baffling mysteries…Rachel believes that the cases are connected – but what possible link can there be?
Rich, ruthless and obsessed with her own dark notions of justice, she will not rest until she has discovered the truth. To find the answers to her questions she joins a house party on the eerie and remote North Yorkshire coast at Mortmain Hall, an estate.”
I felt it was important to include most of the summary here so readers could understand what I’m talking about. Based on that, this is a book that I absolutely wanted to read. Reality, however, was much different.
I found Mortmain Hall to be incredibly slow-paced, which was a huge drag. It wasn’t poorly written, but its summary makes it sound like it’s a very suspenseful novel – it took me until about 80% of the way through to find a hint of suspense. You’d also think that the house party portion of the book would be the main feature, right, since it’s so prominent in the synopsis? Nope! It – the suspenseful part – starts about 85% of the way through the book. The previous 1-84% of the book is spent following some relatively unimportant characters with the occasional focus on Rachel. I found the synopsis to be misleading in that regard, which was incredibly disappointing as that’s what sucked me in.
I don’t want to be too unfair; the bulk of the “extraneous” material earlier in the novel turns out to be relevant to the mystery; I just felt that the build was too slow for the climax to be what it was. I was bored reading this book, really, and I don’t say that too often. The last 15-20% of the book could have been its own short story and I wouldn’t have been upset at all.
Moving on, Rachel Savernake is supposed to be some sort of elegant enigma of a woman, and while she is that, she’s also too mysterious. There wasn’t anything about her that made me want to reach out and learn more. She just seemed like the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings to control events. Miss Savernake needs some sort of personal detail for a hook to pull me in closer.
The reporter Jacob Flint was the most interesting character of the story; he’s observant, cheerful, and alert which makes him an engaging character. His portions of the book were the most interesting to read about as he was our eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, we see a lot from a character called Reggie, who did not interest me a bit and whose role could have been cut out of the story altogether without having much effect on the entire plot.
All in all, I did not enjoy reading this book. It passed the time, but it failed to stimulate my curiosity or create any suspense for me. It is the second novel in the Rachel Savernake series, which I hadn’t realized when I chose it, so it could be that missing the foreknowledge from the first book had a negative impact on my reading experience. I don’t think that I will try the first or any subsequent novels in this series.