Easy read (Find Me A Villain, Yorke 1983)

Margaret Yorke. Find Me A Villain (1983) Nina, blind-sided by her husband’s demand for a divorce after 20 years of what seemed like a solid marriage, accepts a house sitting job in a much too bucolic village. The complications involve the gardener, who may be a serial killer; a shell-shocked ex-Navy man and his fussing protective wife; the vicar (of course); Nina’s children (who detest their father); and so on. The blurb indicates the there is “high tension” and terror, but I found neither. In fact, it took me three tries to get far enough into the story that I wanted to see how the author disentangled the knots she had crafted. So there’s that. The style is functional, best when the author strives for ambience. The characters are barely 2.0D, even Nina, who is the narrative centre of most of the book. I’m writing this about ten days after I finished the book, and had to skim a few pages to remind myself of what it was about.
      Yorke had a successful career as a writer. If this book is typical, one can see why: It’s a mildly engaging entertainment, the kind that people used to buy to while away a train journey. The occasional waspish remarks about the Other Woman and the psychological costs of marriage suggest that Yorke was writing from experience.**