Louise Mumford Audiobooks

The Coffee Shop Detectives: cosy crime narrated by Alison Steadman

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

3 listener ratings

Who is Louise Mumford?

Put detectives in a coffee shop and a subgenre has been declared before the first body turns up. The Coffee Shop Detectives belongs to the cosy end of crime writing, where the amateur sleuth works from a fixed and comfortable base, the community supplies both suspects and witnesses, and the pleasure lies in watching ordinary people apply themselves to something extraordinary.

Louise Mumford arrives with us through that novel, filed under crime and thriller alongside general fiction. Eleven hours is generous for the form, which usually favours brisk, and the extra room tends to go exactly where cosy crime is at its best: into the characters who are not suspects, the routines of the place, and the slow business of making a small world feel properly inhabited.

Louise Mumford in audiobooks

Alison Steadman narrates, and in cosy crime the voice does half the work before the plot has moved at all. The genre depends on liking the company you are keeping, and eleven hours is a long stretch to spend with a reader you have not warmed to.

Only a handful of verdicts have been logged so far, far too few to draw conclusions from, so this is one to approach on its own merits rather than on the strength of a score. If you like your crime warm, low on gore and populated by people you would happily share a table with, it is very well placed. The entry below will tell you more.