Fear in the Sunlight: Josephine Tey Series, Book 4

By: Nicola Upson

Narrated by: Sandra Duncan

Summer, 1936: Writer Josephine Tey joins her friends in Portmeirion, meeting with Alfred Hitchcock to sign a film deal. Hitchcock has a few tricks planned to keep the party entertained, but things get out of hand when a Hollywood actress is brutally murdered. As fear and suspicion take over, Chief Inspector Archie Penrose becomes unsatisfied with the investigation. Several years later another horrific murder drives Penrose back to Portmeirion to uncover the shocking truth.

©2012 Nicola Upson (P)2003 W F Howes Ltd

Too complicated a time-line for me.

I love this series, and have read and listened to them. I like the concept of the fictional character based on a real one, who wrote about fictional ones. But to be honest, this book did not thrill me. The references were a bit too oblique, and the book jumps around in time too much to make for easy reading/listening.
I kept getting lost.
This is the last book in the series but if it wasn't I doubt I would have bought more, the characters were starting to annoy me. Josephine was indecisive and dithery. The book seemed like whole chapters had been edited out, it was well fleshed out in parts and then enormous plot twists were covered in 2 pages.
Not the best book in the series but spectacularly narrated as always.

still great

I've read the previous Tey novels and will read the new one soon, but here's the thing. I keep thinking I'm going to give each of them five stars as I read, and then, once I'm done, I can't in full honesty give them more than four.
I got to Nicola Upson by searching for Agatha Christie-like novels. Someone recommended her as similar on some forum. With Fear in the Sunlight, it all started like a Christie mystery - not the "later" part of the '50s, but the setting, the hotel, the guests, the two parties being gathered together. But what Christie does schematically, in twenty-five pages, Upson does in - well, it was an audiobook so I don't know exactly how many, but it felt like half of the book. She does it extremely well, no question: the people and circumstances come alive, and it does capture your attention.
The problem is what happens afterwards: so much energy is spent on creating the backdrop of the murders, that very little is left for the actual mystery. And the solutions to her mysteries, though not bad, are never quite as clever or plausible as everything else in the book. Other than that, they're great, and the narrator is excellent.