Review for Murder on Oxford Lane by Tony Bassett

If you looked at Murder On Oxford Lane from the snapshot view of both beginning and end, the novel would be a near-perfect mystery or thriller. While it does get a bit bogged down in the middle, where it ultimately ends up is what pushed this from a lower rating to a higher one for me. Along with the rather neat tying up of loose ends, Tony Bassett has created a cast of characters making up the local law enforcement that very much deserve the series he’s built on them.

The novel opens from the point of view of the man who ends up being the catalyst for the rest of the plot, our soon-to-be-missing real estate mogul: Harry Bowers. We do learn more about the man over the rest of the novel, both the good and the bad, the character established in that first scene made me actually care about them going missing. And as every good mystery or thriller novel must have, there are plenty of twists and turns following that first chapter. Though some of the breadcrumbs and red herrings are given more of a spotlight than they perhaps should have been, the great majority of them are more cleverly handled and folded into the rest of the story.

Timing and how it affected the story from a reader’s standpoint is the main reason I almost gave this novel a lower rating. Understanding where everything fits into place was sometimes a struggle for me, even starting from almost the very beginning. We are told outright multiple times that January 8th was the day of the disappearance, but it isn’t until Chapter 24 that we are given a definitive idea of how long after that disappearance was Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy first brought in to interview the family.

The concept of how long certain actions or tests take during the investigation also don’t seem to match up. A week passes for a body to be identified as not the missing person despite visibly glaring differences such as tattoos whereas fibers from multiple coats are tested within the span of a few hours. I think it was more a typo than anything else, but the years that both Bowers were in a relationship together changes from 18 to 14. Most frustrating for me as a reader though involves the side plot of a stalker one of the detectives must deal with. The two were involved in college only for the stalker to show up more than three years later with rapidly accelerating issues. But there’s nothing to address why here and why now as opposed to the time between.

Despite those issues though, the eventual payoff is what ultimately led me to believe Murder On Oxford Lane deserves that higher rating. The fact the author has created a quirky enough team of detectives I already want to read about them in book two doesn’t hurt either.

Murder On Oxford Lane is available to buy on Amazon or you can visit the author’s website to learn more about this novel and his other works.