The Killings at Badger’s Drift: Rating: 4 stars

A sleepy English village becomes the scene of an unlikely murder.

Written by Caroline Graham
Fiction · Mystery
Reviewed September 4, 2007

It’s a rule of mine that I’ll give any mystery series a chance; besides, this book has been recommended to me from at least two quarters. I finally checked it out from the library and started to read it… and had a damn hard time putting it down, too. As far as the mystery goes, it wasn’t terribly hard to figure out (but then, my mind does turn down sick and morbid channels). It was the writing that hooked me — Graham has a way of turning a phrase so that it’s perfectly descriptive and yet entirely original. I’m not inseparably attached to Sergeant Barnaby and his henchman, as I am to Inspector Morse or Sherlock Holmes, but I’m still quite impressed at the author’s choice of the quiet, rather dull sergeant as the main character — instead of slowing the story down, it turned the reader’s attention to the details of the mystery and offset the other (generally eccentric) characters nicely.