Blog Tour: I Died at Fallow Hall – Bonnie Burke-Patel

Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything she’s spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides. But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted.

With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna. Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice. As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI MIstry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself – all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today.

Born and raised in South Gloucestershire, Bonnie Burke-Patel studied History at Oxford. After working for half a decade in politics and policy, she changed careers and became a preschool teacher, before beginning to write full time. She lives with her husband, son, and needy cat in south east London, and is working on her next crime novel about fairy tales, desire, and the seaside.

My thoughts: I know there’s a tendency to compare modern crime novels to the Golden Age ones – easy to say “like Agatha Christie was alive in the 21st Century” but apart from a setting, this is not the same sort of crime novel (and I love Golden Age crime so this isn’t a slight at Agatha).

It’s a modern, intelligent novel that grapples with sins of the father, race in rural England, relationships and the dwindling influence of the landed classes.

Anna is a former ballerina, whose career was ended by injury, and has moved to a small cottage with an outsize garden, growing and selling fruit, veg, jam and cakes at the local market. She pays no rent as it’s managed as part of the estate of the local National Trust type house.

Digging in the garden she finds human remains and calls in the local police in the firm of another recent incomer to Upper Magna, DI Hitesh Patel, recently moved from London after the death of his mother. (Side note; the area his father lives in, Kingsbury, is about 20 minutes away from where I live).

There’s an instant connection between the two, navigating their different forms of grief, as they look into whose remains are in the garden and what led to them being there. Anna, despite being told to leave it alone, can’t help asking questions, and attracting the wrong kind of attention.

I really enjoyed this book, the moving back and forth between Anna and Hitesh, and the memories of a young woman at Fallow Hall in the 60s. Slowly the story of the body in the garden is revealed, and as Anna and Hitesh get closer, a new story for Upper Magna and Fallow Hall is being written.

The ending is shocking and full of twists, and so good too. I really hope this author writes more books this clever and compelling and maybe even revisits these characters.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.