The blurb:
Badger's Drift is an ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster with a nice line in homemade cookies. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up an unseemly fuss, loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething below the picture-postcard prettiness.
AKA the novel that launched a million TV series of Midsomer Murderes...
It's a neat little murder mystery, with a pretty standard sort of uncovering of the Secret Lives of English Villagers, who all seem to be hiding something or other. Some of the secrets are a bit nastier than others, of course.
DCI Barnaby has a long career ahead of him; if the TV movies are any guide, the methods of murder are only going to get more exotic, someetimes surprisingly so for small English villages. In this one, the method isn't so exotic but it is enough to initially, as least, look like a natural death—if only it weren't for Miss Simpson's dear friend, Miss Bellringer, who pushes the case forward.
The narrator, John Hopkins, is prolific, at least by the looks of his Audible page, and a good slab of them are in the DCI Barnaby series. He's got the perfect voice for it: very English, though not a stiff RP pronunciation. He sounds exactly like I expect someone doing a DCI Tom Barnaby to sound, if that makes sense.
Started: 7 December 2025
Finished: 29 December 2025
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