An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good
The Elderly Lady series, Book 1
Helene Tursten, translated by Marlaine Delargy
Soho Crime
Fiction, Collection/Humor/Mystery
Themes: Cross-Genre, Girl Power, Urban Tales
***
Description
Maud may be nearing her ninth decade, and her hair may have long ago gone snow white, but she's still spry enough to travel, sharp enough to live alone, and clever enough to handle her own problems... even if solving them requires an inconvenient murder now and again. In this collection of short stories, Maud deals with a pushy neighbor, a greedy antiques dealer, and other difficulties.
Review
The description sounded light and darkly amusing, a woman with serial killer tendencies who gets away with crime because nobody suspects the little old lady (a little old lady who can fake feeble-minded dithering and elderly infirmity well enough to fool trained detectives). The stories themselves, however, never really clicked for me, often feeling long and meandering and overstuffed with backstory, plus there's a certain sameness that settles in early on: Maud is quietly going about her own life when some irritation crops up, she decides murder is the easiest solution, she does the murder, and goes on with her life. (I don't consider it a spoiler when that's pretty much the description of the whole collection, any more than it's a spoiler in a Columbo episode who the murderer is.) The victims, of course, generally deserve punishment (even if murder is a bit intentionally extreme), so she's more or less doing Sweden a favor by dealing with them, but she doesn't feel a shred of remorse, or really much of anything beyond her own wants or needs. There's also a weird and unpleasant vibe to a couple of stories here that blunted the humor of the overall premise for me. The collection is exactly what it promises, but it just wasn't my cup of cocoa and I mostly just wanted it to end so I could get on to some other audiobook.