A whodunnit where no-one really cares

The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder
C L Miller
Macmillan

The author of this debut novel is the daughter of the late Judith Miller of Antiques Roadshow and Miller’s Antiques Guides fame. So she certainly knows her antiques. The central character is Freya Lockwood, whose first career was as a hunter of missing antiques, aiming to restore them to their countries of origin and their original owners, until a tragedy made her turn away from both that work and her mentor, Arthur Crockleford.

But then, years later, Arthur dies somewhat mysteriously, and Freya’s imperious Aunt Carole, who was a close friend of Arthur’s, summons her back to her old home as a lawyer wants to see them both. And they discover that Arthur has left them a letter, instructing them to follow various clues to find an item of immense value. And so the hunt begins.

Freya and Carole end up in a semi-derelict, not-so-stately home in the English countryside for an apparent antiques weekend, with Freya supposed to be the valuer of the contents of an estate. But she quickly realises that all the antiques on show are reproductions, and not very good ones at that, and the weekend entertainment is not what is appears on the surface. Meanwhile, the other people in the house are a curious bunch, all it seems with something to hide. And slowly Freya begins to realise that there are sinister links to the earlier tragedy in her life, which is finally explained to the reader.

Miller is aiming to put her novel squarely into the “cosy crime” category. But the trouble is that for cosy crime to work, even if the plot is convoluted and maybe improbable, the characters must be realistic, likable and believable and the writing should be skilful. And here this book falls down. The baddies are too obviously bad and even the goodies are cardboard cutouts so that no-one is really convincing. And even when the plot speeds up towards the end, it is hard for the reader to care very much. One of the major oddities is that, while Freya’s sections are in first-person narrative, other parts, dealing with other characters, are apparently from an omniscient narrator and this device unbalances the whole plot structure.

The denouement is certainly surprising, and there are lots of red herrings scattered along the way, but this novel, which is destined to be the first in a series, never really gets off the ground.