I'm really sorry about this novel. I went into it hoping to love it. It is usually my kind of novel: a strong feminist protagonist, a murder mystery, a link with history. On the surface, it's right up my alley. The issue is that the book is terrible. There was nothing 'cosy' about it, despite the marketing. There also wasn't much murder mystery either, making the whole marketing ploy fall on its face.

A very brief overview of the plot is that Eve (our protangonist) is hired to finish a manuscript that was almost-written by a right-wing pundit before his death. 80% of the book is her hunting down that manuscript. The murder part of the novel seems to be added on as an afterthought, and I'm not sure where the mystery came in... except maybe where the mystery is of the missing manuscript.

The writing needs a good editor. There are too many run along sentences that weave in and out of the plot. Speaking of the plot, I still don't understand what Sir Philip had to do with it (beyond being the subject of the missing manuscript), but it was linked throughout and parellels were made... sometimes at a stretch.

The worst part of the book, unfortunately, was the soap boxing. Although I agree with the overall message (I think?), there was no subtlety. It was like being hit in the face with a feminism pan over and over. And I say that as a militant feminist. It made the book feel like a chore or, worse, an assignment.

A real shame, as I really liked the premise. If it wasn't an ARC, I wouldn't have forcced myself to finish. Yet force I did.

Eve Brook is a literary investigator who's drawn into the hunt for a manuscript and the death of its author. This unusual mystery sees her travelling around to discover the manuscript and uncover what happened to the controversial figure behind it.

The book is described as 'cosy crime with a very contemporary edge', which appealed to my love of murder mysteries - both Golden Age and modern. However, I didn't enjoy this story.

Firstly, it doesn't read like a cosy mystery. Most of the book focuses on Eve trying to track down the manuscript. The murder investigation seems like an afterthought and is rushed through late in the book. New characters also emerge and help to solve the mystery.

With the setting of Oxford, I was hoping this would be brought to life to provide a cosy vibe. Unfortunately, there was more emphasis on Oxford college politics than on creating a relatable impression of the city. As someone unfamiliar with the location, I found the setting hard to imagine.

There's definitely a contemporary feel to the story, which is set in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. One of the key conflicts in the story is between the manuscript author's political views (bigoted and misogynistic) and Eve's feminism. However, this element dominated the book to the detriment of the storytelling. At several points, it felt like the conflict was compensating for a lack of depth in the story.

Readers need to be aware that the contemporary style of the book includes sexual references and swearing. These are mild and infrequent but may surprise some readers.

The most challenging part of the book though, is the writing itself. Too much of the story is told through Eve's internal monologue, often repetitive and confusing. Much irrelevant information is shared in long-winded, complex sentences, making the reading hard. What's more, some scenes merge together, and you suddenly realise that Eve is in a different setting without any context or explanation.

A positive point was the refreshing diversity of the characters. I would have liked to see more development of them. However, the dialogue for a character with an accent felt contrived.

Overall, the book didn't live up to my expectations of a murder mystery.

Thanks to the Book Guild and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of the book in return for my honest review.

A wonderful read!
This novel drew me in from the very first page and kept me hooked until the end. The characters were vibrant and relatable, the writing was engaging, and the story had just the right balance of heart and humor. Highly recommend!
Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for my ARC. All opinions are my own.

What a fun debut novel to read! This book was a neat twist on a cozy mystery, with the literary concept at Oxford working well in it. I did feel a little bored at times while reading, mostly because I tend to read books with a lot of dialogue more easily. I enjoyed the ending wrap up and look forward to reading another book by this author. Thanks to #NetGalley for the ARC of #TheDeathOfAnEnglishman.

It took a while to get into this book. It’s third person past tense and uses the past perfect a lot. Not my preffered narrative form. But after the past perfect was dropped, it got easier to read.

Eve Brook is hired as manuscript doctor for a biography on an Elizabethan hero. First, she has to find the manuscript. The author is dead and his widow doesn’t have it (or care where it’s gone off too). Eve sets out of a quest to find the missing manuscript. After a few meetings with people who might know more, I started to wonder: why bother? The author doesn’t seem to have been a pleasant man to be around and the biography would probably be more of a coat rack for his anti-woke world view, than an honest biography of Philip Sidney. I believe Eve would have a hard time sloughing herself through that manuscript.

It seems, though, there is no manuscript. Hurray for that. Then Eve is asked it arrange the memorial service for the author. And she decides to accept.

I decided I had read enough. Arranging events is not her usual job and she neither knew nor liked the man. She decided to accept because it would give her another chance to talk to the people the author left behind.

I don’t want to know.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Anna Beer for providing me with a complimentary digital ARC for Death of an Englishman coming out April 28, 2025. The honest opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This is a debut novel. I really love cozy mysteries and I’ve read a lot of them. I really love mysteries set in England. Unfortunately, this one didn’t feel as cozy to me. I wasn’t really into the mystery. I felt like some elements were lacking. I just wanted more. The characters didn’t really do it for me. I would check out other books by this author.

The Title and description of this book really appealed to me.
An literary detective sleuthing for a lots manuscript in an enchanting Oxford setting - what's not to like?
Unfortunately, somehow this book just didn't hit the spot.

Things I liked:
I liked Eve's character. She was smart and considerate, yet fallible. Her relationship with her daughter was lovely.
I enjoyed the nods to Oxfords hidden world of University traditions and language.
Eve's love of train travel and stationery was quirky and endearing.
The premise of a lost manuscript and the inner familial tensions of the author's family were all intriguing.

However....

Things I did not enjoy:
I don't quite think this book made up it's mind what to be.
Was it a cosy mystery?
Was it a veiled feminist commentary on academia and society?
Was it a showcase for Philip Sydney's lesser known sister?
Was is an examination of middle age female relationships and friendships?
Was it an examination of dysfunctional family dynamics and the repercussions of abusive relationships?

The story starts as a search for a manuscript after the death of an author. It's only half way through the book that Eve begins to suspect foul play. There's a lot of travelling back and forth on public transport and long walks in which the reader is presented with Eve rehashing her thoughts and theories.
The conclusion is obscure and disappointing.

I felt like the bones of this story had real promise but there was just too much going on and sometimes the segues were clunky and hard to follow. I'm not sure I'd follow Eve into another mystery.

I was really drawn in at the start—I love a good Oxford setting, and Eve felt like a refreshingly real character. She’s smart, principled, and independent, and I was curious to see where her assignment would lead. But the story started to lose momentum around the halfway point, with Eve retracing the same steps and inner thoughts a bit too often. The mystery had potential, but the ending didn’t quite land for me. Still, I liked the writing and would read more by this author.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This started put well for me: I like an Oxford setting, and I thought the character of the protagonist Eve was well-drawn and fully rounded. She had actual friends, an interesting job, a relationship with her daughter, feminist principles, and persevered in taking public transport wherever she went. But... then, instead of doing her job (which had initially been to finish off and get ready for publication a book by a sort of Jordan Peterson type, the recently dead David Morrow, and which then morphed into discovering if he had indeed written a word of the book before his death) she decides there is something off about Morrow's death and that it is her responsibility to get to the bottom of things. To this end she travels all around England and to France, stirring things up with all Morrow's family and contacts, keeping secrets and spilling secrets and suspecting everyone of nebulous things.

Even setting aside the strangeness of what she is doing, at about the 50% mark the narrative got really bogged down. Eve would go on a journey and thrash things out in her own mind and then she would do it again, and then again and so on. The ending was an anticlimax and also the sort of ending of which I disapprove. A pity, as I liked the writing and I liked Eve.

I thought there was a lot of potential for this book but it fell short for me. I loved the idea of the MC, a scholar who has chosen to live a bit off the social grid, but found her at times to be so unaware of the world it felt unrealistic. As she tries to find the lost manuscript of a universally disliked colleague, I found myself simply not caring at some points.

I did like many of the secondary characters and wish there was a bit more of them in the story.

Dr. Eve Brook is hired to finish a biography by author/right-wing media personality David Morrow who died . . . or was he murdered? Eve searches for the unfinished manuscript, the secrets of Morrow's life, and the answer to whether he was murdered. "Death of an Englishman" has the bones of an interesting book, but I found myself skimming through long passages and chapters filled with Eve's musings on what had possibly happened, the nature of biography and memory, and the motivations of the various suspects and family members. Thank you to NetGalley and the Book Guild for the eARC.

I was so interested in the description of this book and I was excited to wander around Oxford on this journey but I just could not get over all the woke vs. anti-woke pandering. Not only that, but it was a chore to read. The writing was hard to engage in.

While I did finish this book, it felt like an assignment.

Thank you NetGalley and The Book Guild for the ARC. All opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

This was a fun mystery novel, and I enjoyed it a lot. I am looking forward to reading more by this author.

I should have DNF'd. This flat piece of prose hammers on about important things that are not fully relevant to the story. It's a mystery and it take over half the book to get to the crux of the point. Also, I know it's on the cover, "an Oxford mystery," yet so many of the readers are not of the Oxfordian culture and will have to break their reading to look-up terms and colloquialisms that are not natural to them, and have no further context clues to aid the aforementioned readers.

Death Of An Englishman by Anna Beer follows Oxford’s Eve Brook on a quest for a valuable manuscript. Set against the backdrop of Oxford’s colleges Eve’s quest turns into a hunt for the author’s killer. Everyone Eve meets seems to have something to hide and a reason to want the author, David Morrow, dead.
This book sounded so good and cozy, set against the background of Oxford’s Colleges. The overall plot was good, however you had to decipher a lot of discombobulated text in order to get to it. The author had too many things trying to happen at once; a historical story, the plot, character development and analysis of the events and characters. This caused the story to be very confusing at times. It also didn’t give enough room for anything to develop enough to have an impact. I really feel like this book could have been a success if the author had stuck to the plot and character development.
Thank you The Book Guild Ltd. for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

David Morrow, a white man that no one liked, has died at Oxford. He’s supposed to have left behind a manuscript that no one really wants to read. Eve Brook is asked to find the manuscript. As she looks deeper into finding it, and why no one really wants it, including herself, she begins to think his death has a lot of unanswered questions.
Eve is a singular woman, very disconnected from people. Through her investigations she finds she likes making connections and must try to dig her head out of ancient historical thoughts in order to make her investigation make sense.
It was an interesting book with some really good parts, but sometimes I lost the thread.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Book Guild for this DRC.
#DeathofanEnglishman #NetGalley

The first in what seems to be maybe a new cozy series follows Eve as she is hired to complete the book of a controversial Oxford writer. It seems like many people might have wanted him dead.

I wanted to like this as I love cozies so much! But it felt overly written for a cozy - like it was trying to be more serious fiction almost? I'm not sure and maybe it was just me. But the writing style didn't really match the desired audience.

Book doctor Eve suspects murder after the death of a controversial Oxford don and the disappearance of his manuscript.

This book is written in a literary style, which is unexpected for a murder mystery. The tone is bleak—not atmospheric, just dull and lifeless. The pace is excruciatingly slow. A lot of time is spent on trains moving from place to place, rather than dramatizing the investigation. Murder isn’t really suspected until the second half of the book—the first half is the search for the manuscript.

Mostly, the book seems like a vehicle for espousing the author’s political views. Even a reader who agrees with those views is likely to find their expression inept. The characters are stereotypes, the emotion utterly lacking, the plot thin, the resolution unsatisfying. Fortunately, the book is relatively short.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This is a cozy mystery set in and around Oxford, investigating the death of a professor who was writing an anti-woke book. The setting and topic appealed to me, but unfortunately, this was a huge miss for me for many reasons.

Most importantly, the writing in this book is not good. It's choppy to the point of incoherence, with the author jumping from one thought to the next without any kind of transition or logic. Sentences are often too long and incredibly convoluted, with lots of parentheses and dashes to insert or add information. There are even instances where the author uses parentheses and dashes in the same sentence, creating a paragraph-long nearly indecipherable word soup. On top of that, many words and phrases are used incorrectly. The dialogue is clunky. The inner monologue of the main character feels unnatural. Overall, the writing is so poor that it made it impossible for me to feel immersed in the story at any point.

Almost all of it is also telling rather than showing. The first chapter, for example, is a dense and inelegant infodump, with an enormous amount of names and backstories being thrown at the reader in a short amount of time. The rest of the book isn't much better. We are constantly told things about Eve and other characters, but we rarely actually see those things manifest in the story.

My last complaint is the blatant soapboxing. The author beats you over the head with her messaging over and over again. The worst thing is that I actually agree with everything the author is trying to communicate (about feminism, abuse of power, anti-wokeness, etc.), but it was done in such an unsubtle way that I only felt annoyed. Many of the statements were incredibly basic, like telling the reader that women have been oppressed by men for millennia, without adding anything new or any fresh insight. Moreover, I read fiction in order to see this kind of commentary illustrated in the narrative, not given as a lecture.

Two stars because I appreciate the author's intention for this book. Sadly, I did not enjoy the execution. However, if the summary appeals to you, by all means check it out for yourself.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest opinion.

A decidedly underwhelming read. I was hoping for an intelligently conceived plot, worked around sharply imagined characters and settings, and realized in distinctive and well-wrought prose. After all, the author is a university lecturer in English literature with a published monograph on Milton.

Instead I labored through a threadbare story involving the missing final manuscript of a dead white male (with all the unsavory associations of that term that the highly woke and progressive author is able to inflict on him). The suspects are initially presented as feisty and artsy women, with the obligatory gay couple thrown in to round out the stereotypes. By the end, of course, all liberal pieties will be honored and all fragile sensibilities soothed.

Beer evidently thinks that the way to the riches of bestsellerdom is to condescend to the unwashed by writing in flowing cliches. Nothing original here, no arresting phrases nor interesting diction. The reader is further disrespected by the author's occasional aggressive flashes of her own political agenda and woke attitudes. (Poor Jordan Peterson is name-checked.)

To adopt the author's own nakedly identitarian stance: if you are a college-educated woman of politically progressive inclinations, pleased to be catered to by a credentialled superior, this book will flatter you. If you are a thinking male (or, actually, person) who hopes for literary qualities and a clever plot from even genre-literature, this is not for you.

ARC provided by the publisher and Netgalley.