I have the utmost respect for Peter Ackroyd - he is a genius when it comes to writing history. This story, however, fell far short of any expectation I might have had. This is definitely not the book to start with for new readers of his work.

I'm not sure what Peter Ackroyd was going for here and I am also not sure if he achieved it. This felt like a book that was trying to be a lot of different things. It was a strange thing for a man who wrote a biography of London to write a story set in the countryside and perhaps that was where the wheels began to fall off. Part parody of Agatha Christie, part ... I don't really know. There were so many loose threads and dead ends that the book felt rather incomplete. But I am not sure that I would be hankering for a sequel. I hope that next time Ackroyd will stick to what he does best. I will keep my review private (not on Netgalley) since it was not more positive.

My thanks to Canongate for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Mr. Cadmus’ by Peter Ackroyd in exchange for an honest review.

This was a strange little book, set primarily in the early 1980s with flashbacks to events in WWII. Miss Maud Finch and Miss Millicent Swallow are cousins and have settled down in the idyllic Devon village of Little Camborne, putting their pasts behind them.

Then Theodore Cadmus arrives driving a small yellow car. He hails from Caldera, a Mediterranean island that no one has ever heard of. He moves into the middle cottage between the cousins. His presence soon shatters the safe monotony of their lives. There are secrets galore linked to events in the war resulting in violence, mayhem... and murder.

Over the years I have read and enjoyed a number of Peter Ackroyd’s works of fiction and nonfiction. His novels, such as ‘Hawkmoor’ and ‘The House of Doctor Dee’, have always been offbeat, often blending in elements of the mystical.

‘Mr. Cadmus’ was a dark comedy that took a number of interesting turns. The setup of the genteel village plagued by a series of mysterious deaths is straight out of the classic cosy whodunnit though Ackroyd delights in subverting these tropes.

The cover art is worthy of a mention given it depicts Mr. Cadmus’ parrot, Isolde, that had picked up some salty phrases, allegedly in quarantine, and the rich violet colour that reflects the amethysts that features throughout the narrative.

This was a quirky novel that I found a quick and rewarding read.

Miss Finch and Miss Sparrow are two retired cousins living in cottages in the village of Little Camborne. They lead safe and simple lives until a new neighbour appears, the foreign and lively Theodore Cadmus. As Cadmus settles into life in the village strange occurrences happen and several deaths. is this related to Cadmus or to the cousins.
In the first part of the book the scene seems to be set for a cosy little novel a la Christie crossed with Midsomer Murders. However when a little more is known of Cadmus' back-story there appears to be a darker twist. Again so far so good. It is about halfway through that the story seems to go massively left-field and at that point I completely lost interest. I'm still not sure what was happening in the plot and to be honest I didn't really care. Ackroyd has produced some outstanding books but this is not one of them.

Peter Ackroyd has been one of my favourite authors since the mid 80s, so the publication of his first novel for several years was exciting. Mr Cadmus by Peter Ackroyd started well, we meet seemingly innocent genteel neighbours who turn out to be murderous cousins. Then Mr Cadmus comes to live the house between them, he too has a hidden past. Then the vicar disappears. The stage is set for the mystery to unravel, except it doesn’t. I was left wondering if I had accidentally not read a vital seven or eight chapters.

I very much enjoyed this book. It has a good story and excellent main characters. I would definately recommend this book.

You never know what you are going to get with a Peter Ackroyd novel. The only thing you are assured is that it will not be ordinary.
'Mr Cadmus' is no exception but starts out as what feels like a pastiche of a ‘cosy’ mystery novel, albeit with a few elements bordering on the surreal and a couple of genuinely shocking moments. However, not too far into the novel it takes a distinctly dark turn and approaches some very serious subjects in an eccentric but thoughtful manner.
Add to all that the peculiar, possibly ‘supernatural’ elements of the story and the fact that it is very funny throughout and it only gets stranger and more interesting the further into the novel we go.

Ackroyd has a knack of subtly revealing the novel’s conclusion by carefully being ambiguous to such an extent that after completing his novels I usually have to reread the final chapters a couple of times in order to get close to fully understanding the complexities of the story, and possibly what has actually happened! Some may find this irritating but I like the idea of not being given everything on a plate and actually having to work for the answers and explanations; the author is not the only one who has to put work into this novel, it is almost a dialogue, a two-way process between author and reader and this is part of what makes Ackroyd’s novels interesting, and indeed challenging.
'Mr Cadmus' is certainly not an easy read, but it is a very fine novel and one that I believe will reveal more on subsequent readings.

A strange departure for Peter Ackroyd, Mr Cadmus is an odd novella that starts enjoyably, but goes off the rails in the second half. The arrival of Mr Cadmus disrupting life (particularly for the Misses Finch and Swallow), in a perfect English village is a great beginning, but unfortunately too many genres are delved into for it to hold together as a whole.

Seemingly Peaceful Village Life.....
Satirical, sometimes dark, comedy, a parody perhaps of twee English village life where seemingly nothing much happens on the surface. The Ms’s Swallow and Finch are retired residents of the village of Little Camborne. When a mysterious stranger arrives, Mr Cadmus, the perfect balance of life becomes bizarrely unsettled. Strange, bizarre, amusing and absurd in equal measure.

I’m a bit baffled by this book to be honest. It starts off with us meeting Mr Cadmus, moving into his new cottage in between Miss Swallow and Miss Finch.

Then we delve into to the backgrounds of Finch and Swallow, and I’m loving this book so much.

Then they all come together and have adventures together….and then it goes off the rails madness..erm…I’m confused.

I think I liked it..but I don’t know…it’s madness..or genius…

My thanks to Netgalley and Canongate Books for the advance copy.

Peter Ackroyd writes a short offbeat novella, full of black humour, a satirical and amusing comedy that ventures into weird and bonkers territory. It is a parody of the old classic crime traditional English village where on the surface little seems to happen. Cousins Maud Finch and Millicent Swift, women with a dark history, now live in Little Camborne, an empty house between them, a fact that makes them rather apprehensive as they wonder who might come to reside there. A foreign born gentleman, Theodore Cadmus, from the little known Mediterranean island, Caldera, moves into the vacant property, a man who may not be all that he appears to be. His arrival triggers intrigue, a series of strange events, and a rising body count. A later shift in location to Caldera is, I must warn, the point where everything really go off the rails. This is a highly entertaining, fun, dark and humorous atmospheric mystery, of secrets, revenge, greed, death, greed and jealousy, although a little uneven in its delivery. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.

I‘ve been of fan of Peter Ackroyd for years and I really enjoyed his new novel as well. I do agree with some of the previous reviewers though in that the book became a bit weird in the second half. I did love the humour and especially the atmosphere - something that the author is always great at. 3.5 stars that I‘ll round up to four here.

I'm really not sure what to make of this... it's certainly got a wicked sense of humour and mashes up a twee English village complete with xenophobic and homophobic spinsters who regard large families with children as 'common' with something much darker and more wayward. For, almost immediately, we realise that there's far more to Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow (does it matter that they're both named after birds?) than might at first appear as the first of many dark deeds is uncovered in their shared past...

With murders galore, an enigmatic stranger from a Mediterranean island, disappearances, a mysterious death by amethysts, earthquakes and is that a human sacrifice towards the end?! I kept expecting Mr Cadmus (note his mythological name) to be revealed as a supernatural being but nope. I'm not quite sure what this is about - it's a fun but odd, eccentric read: 3.5 stars.

I was really enjoying this beautifully written, witty book until nearly the end. The whole of the return to Caldera is so at odds with the rest of the book, that it left me bewildered. I'm not sure that I would recommend it to anyone, but I'm glad I read it.

This book had a really good start, an interesting plot. But, it got a bit weird, confusing and off-track in the second half. Nevertheless, it was interesting and enjoyable to read.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Well I started off by really enjoying this book - two ladies living in two cottages in a very twee and quaint little English village; suddenly their lives are disrupted by the arrival of the foreigner Mr Cadmus, who moves into the cottage between them.

Definitely an outsider with his parrot, strange wanderings in the night, and tales of a foreign past - Mr Cadmus soon becomes a key part of the lives of Miss Finch and Miss Swallow.

And there I started to lose the plot, it all got a bit too weird. I did finish it and I think I did enjoy it but it went off the beaten track a bit too much for my liking.

A huge fan of Peter Ackroyd’s fiction of the 80s and 90s, I was left slightly bemused and dissatisfied by ‘Mr Cadmus’. As ever, the writer certainly knows how to conjure up place, character and atmosphere. The inhabitants and village of Little Camborne are an often perfectly pitched satirical take on an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and the body count even higher! The yawningly dull sermons, the sex-obsessed doctor who thinks nothing of enquiring, ‘Anything wrong in the nether regions?’ publicly to one the church congregation, the dreary village fete and the obscene squawkings of a caged parrot certainly tether the village in the English tradition but also provide surprising comedic moments.
At the centre of the story are middle-aged cousins Maud and Millicent, both of whom have past secrets but now are living predictable, quiet, rural lives. Into their midst arrives exotic Theodore Cadmus from the island of Caldera. Why has he chosen to settle in Little Camborne? All is slowly revealed over the course of the tale. However, when Ackroyd moves from village life to rocky Caldera in the final chapters the purpose of the narrative seems less assured. Myth is entwined with crime in a messy tangle.
The novel is an amusing read for the most part. However, is Ackroyd aiming for more than entertainment? Are we asked to beware of foreigners in this xenophobic time? Are the evils of colonisation exposed? Is mankind’s greed condemned? As the novel shape shifts, the reader is left discombobulated – feeling frustrated rather than provoked to think further!
My thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

Much that I love Ackroyd’s non-fiction, I am very pleased that he seems to revisit fiction once again. A curious story of “a dish best eaten cold”. Two spinsters, living in two Dorset cottages and Mr Cadmus moving into the cottage between them. Him a foreigner, an Italian, charming, mysterious, gregarious. The feeling of “what IS he up to?” is constantly in the air, despite an idyllic Cranford-esque scenery. The plot moves from Dorset to Cadmus’s home on a small Sicilian island where both bad memories and treasures are buried. Slightly confusing, but nevertheless an engrossing read.

As an English historian, a biographer, a television presenter and a novelist who has also successfully managed to adapt to a range of styles including period pastiche, it can be hard to know when we're getting the real Peter Ackroyd in his fiction writing. It's of course by no means essential for a writer's own voice to be identified with the content of his work, but in the case of Mr Cadmus the tone is so uneven, falling somewhere between comedic and sinister, that you are left not quite knowing what to make of it, but feeling that whatever its objective might have been,it hasn't been entirely successful.

Mr Cadmus starts out like a comedy of smalltown English manners, introducing us to Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow, two single middle-aged ladies who occupy the outer edges of a row of the three cottages in The Coppice in the village of Little Camborne. The middle house between them has been vacant since the death of the previous owner who they didn't really approve of, but there is some trepidation about the prospective new owner of the cottage. The ladies aren't quite sure what to make of Theodore Cadmus, a foreigner from a small Mediterranean island, but he is certainly intriguing, bringing plenty to ponder and discuss between each other and more widely with the rest of the village.

Far from quiet harmless maiden ladies in a country village, the backstory of Maud and Millicent is revealed to have a rather more sinister edge and they have something of a history together. Both are related as cousins, both were nurses during the war, and both have implicated in or have been actual agents of murders that were never explored due to the circumstances and the war. Ackroyd curiously makes this seem just like a quirk of character, skimming over any deeper psychological or behavioural insights, which could be intentional, giving the story a darker character that sits a little uneasily with the breezy descriptions.

The sleepy little community of Little Cambourne is certainly not without incident now that Theodore Cadmus has arrived. It's not just that he comes with a parrot that swears like a trooper since it got out of quarantine, but the beast of Barnstaple has been attacking young women and the villagers are shocked to hear of an armed hold up in the post office. As we learn more about Mr Cadmus however, it appears that his arrival in the village is not by chance but that he may also have a story related to the war years that has brought him over to England with a certain purpose in mind.

You can it for granted then that the arrival of a foreigner into a very straight-laced community of vicars and village fetes is going to involve eccentricity and differences. It certainly gets very strange indeed, but the writing never seems to be able to draw anything deeper out of this. Certain intriguing elements, characteristics and themes stand out, but they never feel as if they are developed into anything meaningful. To a large extent however the characters are defined by experiences during the war, and these experiences mix uneasily with religion, paganism and superstition.

Mr Cadmus however never really feels like it settles down in any one idea of tone, whether funny, satirical, dark or sinister, which doesn't necessarily have to be a problem, but it never acquires any depth or consistency either. It feels rather as if Ackroyd himself stopped having belief himself in his characters and story as it spins further away from reality into the realms of mythology.

spoiler alert ** Short but not so sweet.
A dark,but very fun read,that had me laugh out loud once or twice.
That rarely happens.
Combining the twee English countryside with (by the end of book) a fairly high body count.
Definitely worth a read.