Relishing in commentary about murder mysteries, The Royal Baths Murder is set at a book festival devoted to murder mysteries, and one of the featured authors is bumped off. Not only that, but the murder is done in a manner similar to that of a murder in one of the books written by another mystery writer, who is also a suspect. It is an “impossible murder” where the killer leaves the murder scene even though there was no way to leave unobserved. The murdered man is Damian Penrose, who was hated by many other authors as well as his ex-wives, so there are plenty of suspects.

The detective in charge is DCI Jim Oldroyd, himself a big fan of the old murder mysteries, and he specializes in difficult cases. The setting is Harrogate in northern Yorkshire, famous for its “Turkish Baths,” which is where the murder happens. This is the fourth book in author J.R. Ellis’s A Yorkshire Murder Mystery, and it certainly plays up the Northern English element. The characters are rather broad and in the unabridged audiobook, narrator Michael Page lays on the accents thickly.

Fortunately, there is a subplot about the sexual harassment of a female police officer by her superior officer, which provides some balance from the slightly self-indulgent quips of characters saying “if this happened in a novel, everyone would say the plot was far fetched.” There’s also some romance for Detective Oldroyd, with a psychotherapist, which leads to some observations between the parallels between their two professions, uncovering hidden truths. This is an enjoyable book with a lot of stock characters and the meta-self-consciousness of the story is mildly interesting.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.