Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Serpent’s Point by Kate Ellis
Reviewed on: November 1, 2024
The 26th entry in the Wesley Peterson mystery series continues to be fresh and imaginative—certainly an incredible accomplishment for author Kate Ellis. Once again, a police procedural—led by Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson and his boss, Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Heffernan—is seamlessly woven into an archaeological riddle that Wesley’s long-time friend and one-time archaeology classmate, Neil Watson, has undertaken.
Susan Brown, a mysterious young woman hailing from the north of England, has taken up part-time employment at the Seashell, a pub at Serpent’s Point, a Devon peninsula jutting out into the English Channel. Her body is discovered on the coastal path—death by strangulation—and Wesley Peterson and his police colleagues are summoned to investigate the murder. Their investigations center on an artist’s colony housed in a rambling estate on Serpent’s Point—a colony inhabited by a cadre of self-styled avant garde artistes, as well as a film production company shooting a soft-core porn flick pretending to be an historical epic. Susan Brown had been house-sitting for one of the resident artists and in the dwelling the police discovered an “incident room,” which Susan had created to apparently investigate two criminal cases: the disappearance of Simone Pritchard two years earlier and the murder of Avril Willis some four years earlier. Wesley and crew draw the logical conclusion that it was her interest in these two cases that drew her to Serpent’s Point and must have led to her brutal end.
Coincidentally, two young metal detectorists unearth several exotic coins in a field adjacent to Serpent’s Point and when they bring them to Wesley’s attention, he in turn summons his old friend, Neil Watson of the County Archaeological Unit, to investigate the girls’ discovery. He is certain the coins are Roman, bearing the likenesses of Vespasian and Hadrian. The finds could be of momentous archaeological and historical significance because it was believed that the Romans had not inhabited this part of England.
The criminal investigation proceeds apace, with the red herrings and dead ends that author Ellis so deftly weaves into her complex plots. Multiple suspects are brought to the fore and the eager reader is ready to conclude: “Ah hah, he/she is certainly the culprit,” only to have that conclusion dashed. But the ultimate conclusion is always logical, and the author never fails to plant clues that the discerning reader should (but never does) ascertain.
Neil’s excavation of the field at Serpent’s Point at first seems to be quite separate from the murder investigation, but a brutal beating he suffers on the site at the hands of a phantom attacker would seem to strongly hint that the two plot threads are not as separate as it might seem at first blush. And when the skeletal remains of a hundred-year-old murder victim are unearthed, along with indisputable evidence of a first century AD Roman occupation at Serpent’s Point and a contemporary murder from that era, it is apparent that Serpent’s Point has a long and bloody history.
Once again, Kate Ellis has woven a complex and most satisfying mystery. Four trowels for Serpent’s Point.
