Ninth in the cosy crime series about Thea Osborne, house sitter extraordinaire. Her latest assignment is to look after geckos and their incubating eggs at a lovely Victorian Arts and Crafts style manor in the village of Cranham, and to welcome Donny, a man in his early seventies, who rents the nearby lodge and makes a regular afternoon visit to the manor for a cup of coffee and a chat. Thea finds him interesting despite his occasional self-pity about his apparent health problems and the loss of one of his daughters who suffered from heart disease and died after an operation. As a result, he has a fear of being dependent and lingering in hospital at the mercy of the medical profession which he hates. His surviving daughter Jemima refuses to discuss his concerns believing them morbid, and when Donny asks Thea if she could help him plan his funeral, well-meaning Thea offers to introduce him to her friend Drew, who runs an alternative funeral business in Somerset and is supposed to be opening a local branch.

A couple of days later, on the day when Thea had arranged with Drew that he will drive there to discuss options with Donny, Jemima asks for her help in gaining access to the lodge, and they find Donny dead, apparently from suicide. The rest of the story deals with the pros and cons of assisted suicide and its morality as well as the legal hurdles, plus the suspicion that Donny didn't kill himself, triggered by an anonymous tipoff to the police that Donny's girlfriend Edwina had talked about helping him when the time came. A minor subplot is Thea's attempt to help a runaway collie bitch who has escaped to the woods to have her pups because her owner killed her previous litter.

Thea is more than usually tactless in this story and rather prone to superiority and the assumption that she occupies the moral high ground, so she often doesn't seem likeable. However, most of the other characters are equally unpleasant. She seems totally deluded in her conviction that Jemima is a friend because of their experience of finding Donny, when Jemima is unrelentingly rude and obnoxious towards her. Other characters are also hostile, and it transpires that Thea's previous involvement in helping the police to solve murders elsewhere in the Cotswolds has given her a reputation. A lot of the book goes rather slowly over the same ground. There are some nice descriptions of parts of the Cotswolds, and we have the ongoing development of the relationship between Thea and Drew which is awkwardly platonic given the existence of his brain damaged wife, but the story could have been told more succinctly and hence effectively. ( )

I struggled with this book. It took me a week to read the first 260 pages, and I'd lost interest by then. I skimmed through the next few chapters and then read the ending.

It started off nicely enough. However, I soon came to dislike the main character. She was interfering and got peoples' backs up too easily. If I'd lived in that village I would've avoided her. And to say this is the 9th book about her, she didn't seem too sharp when she spoke to the police. So I'm guessing her character hasn't developed too much.

The book was very long winded, with huge paragraphs relating to nothing in particular, and lots of irrelevant dialogue. I take it the author really likes dogs. I'm not a dog person, so the numerous pages of descriptions and conversations about dogs did nothing for me. The main point of the story got lost many times.

The Cotswolds and the pace of life there did come across very well, though. It's made me want to visit agin.

I won't be reading any other books by this author. I just didn't get on with her writing style. ( )

Part of Thea's duties in her latest gig is providing an afternoon coffee for an elderly neighbour. On her third day, he is found by Thea and his daughter having apparently committed suicide with a plastic bag over his head. Although he had often said he would rather die than become too dependent or submit to medical indignities, Thea has her doubts as to what happened.

Thea is forced into self-reflection by people who object to her nosiness and tactlessness. She also finds out that she has gained herself something of a reputation as a sleuth in area with a murder rate only slightly less than such dangerous parts of the world as Midsomer. Also much pondering over the difficulties that would arise if assisted suicide were made legal. ( )