Book Review: Dead and Buried

Title: Dead and Buried

Author: E.G. Ellory

Date: 2025

Quote: "A convicted killer had been released after thirty-eight years behind bars."

And he's coming back to Fenburne--the place he knows, of course, and also the place where the older people know him. Where several people want him dead, and some would quite enjoy beating him to death. Where his role in some unsolved murders, and the whereabouts of the bodies, remain to be discovered from the secrets people thought were long dead and buried. 

This is volume three in the Fenburne murder mystery series. Readers are likely to know Sam Hyatt, who is officially retired (and who helped, early in his career, to imprison the serial murderer), and his buddy Jodie Walsh, who's spent two volumes first coming to terms with her attraction to Hannah and then making sure that Hannah is a lesbian too. Will they ever become a couple? What brought Hannah to Fenburne, anyway? Is she someone Walsh wants to get involved with? Will Hyatt's married daughter, who is about Jodie's age, be in danger? What about Hyatt's contemporaries, a few of whom are still on the police force? We're told that the serial murderer wants not to kill again, although he's planning to take advantage of some harmless retired people for money; will he have killed, be killed, or neither, when the first recent murder brings Hyatt and Walsh into action as detectives?

I find Ellory's type of mysteries more satisfactory than the grim and gory "hard-boiled" subgenre or the bland and often too easy "cozies," Because the atmosphere of this series is the kind of thing Arthur Conan Doyle, or Dorothy Sayers, or early Agatha Christie used to write, perhaps, what I like about the book also drew my attention to what I didn't like so much. Writers are often advised to "show not tell" when writing fiction. The proportion of showing to telling in this novel is high--and I kept thinking that Doyle or Sayers or Christie might have jotted down all that author's voice stuff in their outline-and-suchlike or even their first drafts, but they would have thought of a way to show the information via action or at least conversation when they sent their manuscripts to the publisher. Is it worth picking at this, when Ellory has a following of fans who don't mind it? Yes. I think Ellory is one of the self-published authors who are worth encouraging to develop their talent, to write as well as the masters of their genres.