A Man of Some Repute

This was... OK? This was serviceable. I felt that the beginning was a bit muddy and I couldn't tell the difference between most of the characters, aside from the central few, but it got more engaging around the 50-75% mark.

The ending was incredibly predictable however. Not that I could've guessed the culprit, but the way we find it out felt a bit contrived (It was a deus ex machina on two levels. First a maid who was conveniently dismissed and therefore missing through the whole story suddenly just tells them she witnessed the whole scene, and then the actual “murderer” herself confesses out of a fit of conscience, I guess? It felt like Hugo and Freya did pretty much almost no detecting at all.).

Not only that, we have an ending “climax” scene which was straight out of a formula. The moment things started happening, I already knew exactly how things were going to play out to a tee. (Of course Hugo would independently deduce somehow that it was actually Guthrie who had killed Selchester, and of course he is unable to reach Freya to tell her about it before she unadvisedly wanders out into murky conditions to find Guthrie and, for no good reason, spill the beans to him and immediately after realise that he is the murderer just before he tries to kill her. Everything was just straight out of a textbook, imo. I could've excused such formula if it was done by, say, Conan Doyle or Christie because they were basically progenitors of such tropes, but in a contemporary book written decades after these tropes have become incredibly overplayed, it was just incredibly disappointing.)

It was OK. I'm indifferent to continuing the series - I didn't hate the experience but I felt like there wasn't much in the story that is appealing enough to me to want to read more of it.

With the thinnest relationship to espionage, or treachery against King and country, this novel disappointed in its lack of depth. Efforts at multi-dimmentional characters were stunted and details used in developmental stages lead to nothing in the end.

From start to finish, myriad details were left completely untouchrd:
-The Local Play
-What Selchester's niece was writing
-The missing notebook
- And all the gossip adsociated

The story was barely entertaining.

A nice cozy read. I liked the characters and the plot. It was rushed at the end. I'll read the next book in the series.