Death Under a Little Sky

by Stig Abell

Harper 2024

Former Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell opens his new book, a murder mystery called Death Under a Little Sky, with enough tired cliches to make one of his erstwhile book reviewers start drinking bourbon at 10 in the morning instead of their customary noon. 

A former hotshot London detective gets burned out and walks away from the job. He has an eccentric, wealthy uncle who leaves him an old house and wild property in the peaceful countryside and then obligingly pops his clogs. The old house provides the former hotshot detective, Jake Jackson, with the balm of peace in the wake of both his burnout and his failed marriage. The place is chock-a-block with eccentric locals. They have an eccentric local custom where the whole village turns out to hunt the bones of a local saint – the St. Aethelmere Bone Hunt, of course, nothing strange about that. The burned out detective is convinced to join the hunt, and you’ll just never guess what: recent bones are found during the hunt! Bones of somebody who might have gone and got themselves murdered, maybe by one of those eccentric locals. The local Chief Inspector will eagerly serve as Watson to the detective’s Holmes. The local Chief Inspector’s name is Watson. Bombarded with all of these tired old gimmicks all at once, even the most jaundiced book critic might be tempted to seek out honest employment. 

Somehow, astoundingly, Abell just keeps piling on the cliches without ultimately sinking his novel under their weight. A character tells Jake “You’re bad news, and no good can come from you stirring up trouble,” and the reader groans. A character tells Jake, “You’ll have to get to the bottom of this to get any peace,” and the reader clenches in eye-rolling disbelief. A character tells Jake, “We don’t want curious folk here. We like it quiet,” and the reader suspects there’s some kind of elaborate prank being pulled. 

And yet, it doesn’t crush the book, and since we have literally not one single possible alternate explanation, we have to chalk it up to some almost ineffable sincerity of Abell’s storytelling. The locals are all one-dimensional (with the exception of the spirited veterinarian Livia, the book’s only actual character); the plot is as predictable as a bus route; the culprit is as obvious as a cow in an elevator. Jake himself is a plank of wood; he even thinks in bad TV dialogue. “The lake swallows the sounds of the night as he approaches the house; it glistens and shivers, restless and alive, watery jostling of creatures he cannot see,” goes one passage, getting reader hopes up with good evocative prose, only to dash those hopes with: “The basic lesson of policework, of life: there is always more than meets the eye.” Ooof. 

Threading weakly but persistently through all this is the story of a lost man slowly, gradually finding a kind of home. That natural environs of his new house (Little Sky) are lovingly described, and there’s a wonderfully bookish note sounded throughout involving the thousands of murder mysteries in the gorgeous library Jake’s uncle included with the house (he names the various natural features of his land after famous fictional detectives). These and other random elements serve to take the edge off how incredibly familiar so much of the rest of it feels. The only thing that could completely rip apart the pleasant picture constructed by the final page would be another dead body turning up in Jake’s village, since in the world Abell’s built here, a “Murder, She Wrote”-style string of homicides would destroy the verisimilitude that somehow manages to emerge from these chapters. 

Maybe cancel the next St Aethelmere Bone Hunt? 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News