Archeological female amateur sleuth!

Four Thousand Days (Margaret Murray #1) by M.J. Trow     

Interesting start to a new series set in London in 1900. Honorary Dr. Margaret Murray seems somewhat like a younger Miss Marples. She’s shrewdly intelligent, totally committed to her discipline, curious, and a pioneer for women in what has mostly been a man’s world. Based loosely on real person, Murray is an junior archeological lecturer at University College, London at a time when women academic staff are an athemna in the male dominated halls of academia.

A young woman who attends Margaret’s public archaeological sessions one afternoon a week, and moonlights as a street walker is dead. Another of her students, Adam Crawford (a constable with Scotland Yard) is convinced her death is a murder and not a suicide as the senior constabulary would want. Margaret is determined to investigate and makes the acquaintance of retired Inspector Edmund Reid.

Reid is drawn into the investigation by curiosity, another dead body, and a barely concealed disdain for the way Detective Inspector Blunt ( his successor) is stomping all over the murders, wanting a quick result, whether that is the truth or not.

Actually there were so many characters we were introduced to I became a tad confused. I delighted in the Doctor’s unflappability, but the pace of the story was uneven. In the end the reasoning behind the resolution and Margaret’s actions were just a bit too Dan Brownish for me. 

Still, I’m eager to see where the good archaeologist might go in the future and will continue to monitor her progress.

The undercurrents of relationships, particularly sexual, in the hallowed halls of learning, have all the hallmarks of an academic Midsummers Murder type community, or as Jane Marples tells us the microcosm of a village (our village being the London halls of learning in the early 1900’s) where all types of negative behavior in the wider world are present.

A Severn ARC via NetGalley 

(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)