Book Review: Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well

Aunt Dimity & The Wishing WellBy Nancy AthertonViking, 2014 Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity & The Wishing Well is the nineteenth novel in her “Aunt Dimity” series, and that indicates a certain degree of success. By this point Atherton is a seasoned pro at generating these mystery novels, which firmly inhabit the “cozy” spectrum of the genre. Cozies are murder mysteries in which a very specific atmosphere trumps any specific crime; a tight-knit and tiny community, a place where everybody knows your name, is the main readership-draw in these books. The little towns or villages that form the setting of these books are elaborately planned out by their authors – the streets, the churches, the village green, the school, the library, all quaint and small, all filled with familiar people going about their familiar routines.The whole point of the murder in a cozy mystery is that it’s the worst possible interruption in all these routines, and the whole goal isn’t to find justice but to return the village to its normal routines. The confined, familiar comforts of the setting are described in such loving detail that it becomes quickly clear even to a genre newcomer that chaos is the real enemy here. Many ongoing cozy series seem to want to triangulate death out of the equation altogether (to that end, quilting or caroling or baking detectives sometimes solve petty larcenies or mistaken identities).In their most important aspect, the “Aunt Dimity” novels represent the end-point of that triangulation. The novels are set in the quaint Cotswolds village of Finch, where our heroine, a transplanted American named Lori Shepherd, lives with her husband Bill, her elderly father-in-law Willis, and her twin sons, and although they're all technically American by nationality, they've long since been welcomed into the all-important community:

While Willis, Sr., tended his orchids and courted Amelia Thistle, Bill ran the international branch of his family’s venerable law firm from an office overlooking the village green, the twins attended Morningside School in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping, and I juggled the ever-changing roles of wife, mother, daughter-in-law, friend, neighbor, gossip monitor, and community volunteer. Over the years, Bill, Will, Rob, Willis, Sr., and I had become vital threads in the fabric of our village and we did our best to keep the cloth intact.

Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well opens - as so many cozies tend to, since it's as convenient an excuse as any to get the whole village together, with a funeral. In this case, the deceased is Mr. Hector Huggins, who'd been that rarest of rarities in life, a Finch recluse. “In a village where everyone knew virtually everything about everyone else," Lori narrates, "Mr. Huggins had managed the miraculous feat of remaining anonymous.”His funeral is attended by a good sampling of the fuzzy, safely rounded village characters who've populated Atherton's novels since the early 1990s; there are grocers and vicars and spinsters, all with names like Wodgley and Thistlebottom, and the writing of their jokes and interactions makes it painfully clear that Atherton would be happy simply to write a novel of such stuff, leaving out the crime element entirely in favor of innocent chatter and household hints (a recurring notorious - er, I mean charming - feature of the "Aunt Dimitty" novels is the inclusion of baking recipes for the reader). But  - whether through publishers' fears or author's daring - mystery always intrudes. In this case, in the form of an attractive last-minute arrival at the funeral:

The newcomer was a young man – in his midtwenties, perhaps. He was dressed in a dark-brown rain jacket, khaki cargo shorts, and a pair of rugged hiking sandals, and though his clothes were slightly shabby, he was much more than slightly good-looking. His blond hair was like tousled corn silk, his eyes were blue as a summer sky, and his deeply tanned face made his teeth seem almost too white. Even his toes, which were rapidly turning pink in the cold air, were handsome. As he paused to catch his breath I could sense hearts fluttering among the faithful, but though many mouths had fallen open, words seemed to be in short supply.

This striking young Apollo is Jack MacBride, nephew of the deceased, and his arrival sets in motion a chain of more or less predictable cozy-mystery contrivances (nobody comes to this kind of novel to be surprised, even a little) that quickly ensnare Lori and her brood. And reading such a cursory description, a newcomer to the series might be wondering why it isn't called the "Lori Shepherd" series - and the explanation brings us back to the aforementioned cozy-mystery triangulation. Aunt Dimity is indeed the star of these books, using her knowledge of the village and of human nature to help Lori out - but Aunt Dimity is dead. She communicates with Lori from the afterlife.It's all done very comfortably - no River Styx, no bloodied sword, no thirsty ghosts - but even so, it rips the heart out of Sherlock Holmes's sardonic edict "No ghosts need apply." Because Aunt Dimity's assistance in solving Finch's murders not only erases dramatic tension (she can't be wrong, after all, nor can she be deceived), it also erases the need for solutions in the first place - because it erases death. If we're still recognizably ourselves after death, still full of insight and humor, still involved with and interested in human affairs, then we can only barely be said to die at all - and so our murder becomes at worst a minor rudeness on the part of our murderer. If young Jack McBride is grieving for his uncle, he should just hang around for a bit - the old man is bound to start communicating through a gin rummy deck, or a favorite duck-hunting whistle.In Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well, as in all the other novels in this series, Aunt Dimity's wise gnomic utterances and Lori's feisty pluck combine to solve the crime. Why either one of them bothers is another story.