He had trained for the priesthood at Oxford after years spent in the service of the security service, MI5, to which he had been recruited while still an undergraduate at Oxford. However, after the violent death of a close friend and colleague, he felt he could not continue in MI5: "He had seen it all, witnessed too much .... So began his surrender to feeling rather than to thought" as he joined “the dwindling ranks of men and women who saw the church as an avenue of peaceful change."

He has a quick understanding of people and their motives and is a shrewd observer, so becomes what a friendly police officer calls, “a regular Miss Marple in Holy Orders".

G M Malliet did post-graduate work at Oxford University after earning a graduate degree from the University of Cambridge. She worked as a journalist and copywriter for news publications and broadcasters thennd c went on to write the award-winning Cambridge-based St Just series which, she says, offers "affectionate send-ups of the traditional British mystery." She now lives in Virginia - and that is all the biographical information she seems prepared to divulge!

Wicked Autumn (2011)
Wicked Autumn Introduce us to some rather stereotyped village characters, including Wanda Batton-Smythe, the formidable and much-feared head of the local Women's Institute. She had made many enemies who are not too upset when she is found dead at the Harvest Fayre. Local vicar Max Tudor suspects foul play and eventually manages to confront the murderer.

Other characters include Mrs Hoosier, who was “at best an indifferent housekeeper .... a fact to which Max had long become resigned .... With bovine cunning, she would attempt to hide the evidence of the latest catastrophe – the broken crockery, the missing drawer handle."

Wanda's husband, the pompous Major, “was almost a Dickensian character, wearing blockaded waistcoats in all seasons and with a Rudolph-like red nose that could nearly light the way in the holiday pageant." He had never seen any action during his army lfe; indeed a senior officer had recommended he should “be confined to a behind the scenes role – very behind."

There's also an unpublished author, Frank Cuthbert, who “was offering an unwary public his self-published book – a long, wrangling, crackpot pamphlet really – on the history of the region, spliced with dubious, hand drawn maps of local walks that, if followed closely could land the user miles from civilisation."

Then there is Constable Musteile who was “ramrod straight, unyielding, and imaginative. Profoundly stupid, in fact. A man who followed the rules, and asked no questions as to whether each rule really applied in every situation."

There are lots more such characters that emerge more as caricatures than as real people, although the author can write with real humour. Indeed even the figurine of a shepherdess is amusingly described as “made of plaster of Paris and amateurishly painted, the shepherdess's hectic expression suggesting a facelift operation gone wrong, the receipt of a telegram containing bad news, or the irretrievable loss of her flock."

The story unfolds in an unexciting sort of way and the final arrest of the murderer, followed by pages of explanatory material is less dramatic than you might suppose. It is intended as the first of a series of books so perhaps the character of Max Tudor will develop.

The author has her own website.



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