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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast, where you’ll discover new mystery books and authors. I’m USA Today bestselling mystery author Sarah Rosette. I’m also a bookworm who specializes in the mystery genre. I love sharing my favorite mystery discoveries from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies.

This episode is all about Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang. Unnatural Ends was published in 2022 and it’s a standalone novel.

Blurb

Here’s the blurb.

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered. Savagely beaten to death in his own study with a medieval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children.  To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into their past. As their suspicions mount, of each other and of particular strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow, they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth. 

Here’s the first line. In the beginning was Linwood Hall, and Linwood Hall was the world.

Settings and Characters

Let’s get into setting and characters. The book is set in Linwood Hall, which is located in Yorkshire, and it’s on the moors. It’s got these gothic overtones to the setting. You’ve got this mansion, this estate up on the hill, and then down below it, in the little hollow of the valley, there’s Linwood Hollow.

The prologue that I read was in 1903, and then we get three different point of views characters throughout most of the novel. There’s an additional character or two that has a scene or two of their own, but mostly it’s the three children. And the narration alternates between their point of views. And we see in the early, the prologue takes place in 1903, the most of the story takes place in the 1920s, but we do get a couple of flashbacks to world war one.

Now we have three children. We have the oldest is Alan. He is a historian, he’s an archaeologist, and he’s interested in the past. We have the second son, Alan’s the oldest. The second son is Roger. He’s a futurist, and he’s an inventor, and he’s always looking ahead to the possibilities of what could be. And then we have Caroline, who’s the youngest, and she is, she’s a little bit harder to define in just one word.

As the story goes on, you realize why, and I won’t spoil that, but she, at the beginning of the story, you find out she’s a reporter and she’s working in Paris. Her father had big plans for her. She was to work as a reporter for a few years and then go into politics. 

And this was very typical of the father who was Sir Lawrence. And even though we don’t meet him as a character, we meet him in the flashbacks and his shadow is on the whole story over the children, their whole lives. He’s a very dominating personality and very demanding and had extremely high standards for his children and wanted them to achieve great things. He adopted them all and he raised them all with this thought in mind that they would do great things. 

And then the last character that we have is Iris Morgan, and she is Roger’s fiancee. So the second son, who is the futurist, the inventor, and likes all things modern. She is his fiancee, and it’s funny because she’s described as a very modern young woman. She’s very contemporary and like on the forefront of fashion. And looks very cosmopolitan, which is exactly the sort of person that Roger would be interested in and drawn to. 

And I thought that the characterizations in this book, the characters are so deep and they’re individualized. I just really enjoyed that aspect of the book. So that’s a little bit about the characters. 

The setup I’ve already mentioned is that it was in the blurb, the father dies and we learned that the children are called home because of his death and they think it’s for the funeral. And then when they arrive, they learned that he’s been murdered and it’s set up in a way, his will is set up in a way so that they must solve his murder to figure out who did it, and then they’ll receive their inheritance.

With this book, just the setup alone, I just got all of the Agatha Christie vibes with the kind of gothic overtones to the setting and then the father with the children and them called back and having to investigate to solve the case of who murdered him. Very golden age fiction reminiscent. Really love that. 

Themes and Tropes

Okay, so let’s talk about themes. As you can tell from the opening line that I read, the religious theme in this book is very strong. Not that it is about religion or that it’s preachy, but there is an exploration of God and playing God in a way. Like how much control should somebody have?  That is one of the themes. Control, independence, expectation. 

Another theme is competition. The children are always competing against each other. The father has set it up that way. Sir Lawrence believed that you did well. If you competed, it brought out the best in people and the competition was good.  And in many cases it is. But this book is an exploration of whether or not it’s always good. And if it can be pushed too far, I think would be the question around the competition theme. 

Then there’s also the theme of found family, which is interesting because these children, they’re all adopted.  So they all have different backgrounds and the way they come together throughout the book. It’s an interesting look at, they should be a family anyway, but as the book goes on, they’re drawn apart and then back together. 

And then another exploration in this book, one of the themes is sentiment versus reason. Sir Lawrence hated sentiment and didn’t think it had any place in the world and thought it led to bad decisions. And so he leaned into reason and part of the struggle that the children have is they’re trying to figure out, is sentiment good? At times, is it necessary and needed. And if that is true, then what point does sentiment play in their lives? When can they lean into it and when should they pull away from it?

With the richness of themes in this book, I think Unnatural Ends would make a great book club book. That’s hard to say. There’s plenty to dig into to discuss. And I just think that it would lend itself well to a book club setting. 

Okay. So let’s talk about some of the tropes really quickly. We’ve got the patriarchal set up with someone who’s died.  They have their children gathered and the will is read. This is a classic golden age trope, one that I personally am always here for. 

Another trope that we have is the country house slash village mystery. And, everything revolves around the state and the village, but it has a few unique twists to it. It does not have a church, which is a little bit. Odd for an English village, and that plays into the storyline, the theme about religion and the theme of, whether or not you need religion and the theme of playing God. So that is an interesting aspect. We don’t have a whole lot of scenes in Linwood village or Linwood Hollow, but there are enough that we get a sense of the place and how the village interacts with the family from the hall. 

Another trope, a classic trope, is the locked room mystery. They’re not sure how the murder was committed. And so that is the first thing that the siblings investigate. Sir Lawrence died in his study. And so they go in to search out the study and see what they can find. From that point, the investigation branches into three different sort of tracks we’ve got each one of the children has something that they begin investigating and it all has to do with their past. But interestingly each one is not investigating their birth origin story, but one of their siblings.  So I thought that was an interesting way to bring the siblings into investigating things, but not have it be so focused on themselves. In a way it brings them closer in the end because they were investigating each other’s mothers, which I thought was a really interesting choice. And I really enjoyed watching Alan and Roger and Caroline as they navigated through discovering what had gone on in the past. 

The Story Behind The Story

Okay. So I’m going to leave the character story themes tropes, leave that there. There’s so much more to discuss, but I can’t do very much more without giving away key plot points. I don’t want to do that. So let’s move on to the story behind the story and the fun facts. 

The author grew up in Singapore and he says Agatha Christie greatly influenced his work. There’s a YouTube video that he. Did for an online conference and I will link to that in the show notes in his Amazon bio. It says he lived in Singapore for 17 years and then he moved to Canada. And I love this with the expectation of cooler weather, which I certainly identify with living in Houston. And he now lives in Calgary.

Now, another interesting thing about this book is it was published through Ink Shares and that is a, their website states that we’re a book publisher that has readers, not agents or editors decide what we publish. We publish any work that successfully hits a pre order threshold on our platform. And by publish, we mean we edit, design, print, distribute, and market books.

So it’s a very interesting background for the publishing side of this book because that’s a little bit unusual. I haven’t heard of this type of this exact format of working with authors, a publisher working with authors in this way, but I think it’s really cool. And I’m going to go check out the website. 

Recommendations

So as far as read-a-likes and other things you might enjoy, if you like this book, I would say look for Huang’s first book. It’s called A Gentleman’s Murder. I read it a couple of years ago and it was excellent as well. It’s got that same sort of golden age flavor to it. You can really tell that Huang was influenced by Agatha Christie and that he wants to bring those same feelings of The Golden Age of Novels to his books.  And I just really enjoyed A Gentleman’s Murder. 

If you’re looking for multiple POV mysteries with siblings, I would check out The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie. That is the only book that I could think of that has two siblings or siblings investigating a murder. I enjoyed that aspect. I think maybe just because it was something different, something that I don’t usually see in mysteries.  I really enjoyed watching Jerry and Joanna solve this mystery in this little English village.

If you like the Yorkshire location, you can look for the Kate Shackleton mysteries. Book one is called Dying in the Wool, and that’s by Frances Brody. 

So my question for you is, can you think of any other mysteries with siblings as sleuths?

If you can, I would love to hear from you. You can let me know on Instagram at Sara Rosett. That’s  no H on Sarah and no E on Rosette. Or you can leave a comment for the show notes on this episode and that will be at sararosett.com/unnatural. Thanks to NetGalley and Ink Shares for sending me a review copy.

All opinions are my own. I hope this podcast has let you revisit a favorite book or perhaps helped you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I hope you’ll tell a fellow mystery reader. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.