Curiosity Killed The Cat

by Joan Cockin

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 276
Series: Inspector Cam #1
Rating:

Synopsis:

Little Biggling: a village that had been taken over by The Ministry of Scientific Research during the Second World War ... and after the War the Ministry had stayed on, much to the annoyance of several of the residents. However, being annoyed was one thing, being murdered quite another. It seemed that one of the members of the Civil Service who billeted in the village had been a little too curious about everybody and everything in Little Biggling, and there was a terrible price to pay. Inspector Cam found that he wasn't getting much help in finding the person who had most to hide...

Joan Cockin’s Curiosity Killed the Cat was pretty good: set in the aftermath of WWII, but still echoing with it, as many of the characters are part of a scientific unit doing research related to the war/recovery from the war, and living with a lot of secrets and inconvenience. That made for an interesting setting.

The characters were enjoyable enough too: Inspector Cam isn’t too fond of working hard, and would rather stay an Inspector and avoid working on such big cases as murder — but he does his duty and works hard at figuring out the mystery, which makes him perhaps a little more real than detectives who just enter the stage as police officers without much real life around them. I wouldn’t say that the characters are all really fleshed out, but there’s enough there to be enjoyable, and to care about Charity and Robarts and Ratcliffe.

It’s hard sometimes to say what counts as a three-star or a four-star book, and to compare between books to figure out what to rate them. In the end, though, I kept wanting to read more, “just a little bit more”, and figure out the mystery, and I do want to read Cockin’s other books — so four stars it is.

Rating: 4/5