Usually I don’t do “spooky season” reading, since my main hope for spooky season is that it will pass without anyone trying to make me watch a horror film or go to a party. I didn’t consciously plan to read Elly Griffiths’ The Stranger Diaries during October, but it worked out to be perfect timing. The Stranger Diaries is the first in the Harbinder Kaur series of crime novels, of which I read the second (The Postscript Murders) last year. It has three first-person point-of-view characters – Harbinder herself, a secondary school teacher called Claire Cassidy, and Claire’s teenage daughter Georgia – plus it’s interweaved with excerpts from a ghost story by (fictional) author RM Holland. During the autumn half-term, Claire is teaching an adult education class on creative writing when she gets a call telling her that her colleague and friend, Ella, has been brutally murdered. She is horrified – even more so when she first meets the police officer investigating the case, Harbinder Kaur, who tells her that it seems like Ella was murdered by someone she knew…

The plot meanders to start with – as I almost always find with multiple narrators. Alongside her teaching job, Claire is working (slowly) on a biography of RM Holland, who used to live in the school where she now teaches, and some of her early narrative is spent dealing with this rather than the rest of the plot. (Of course, this soon after I read Possession, it’s difficult to avoid comparisons, and I have to say The Stranger Diaries came up short). Once the investigation really kicked off, though, the book was much more gripping. I thought the solution was telegraphed fairly on – and for once, I was right – but when I was writing this review, I went and looked up other reviews, and found that everyone else was surprised at the end. For once I picked up on a clue and interpreted it correctly! And, to be fair to Griffiths, I did continue to second-guess myself and suspected almost every character at one point or other, so she kept me engaged throughout.

Gothic and Gothic-inspired novels like this one (creepy old houses, spooky elements, a faint whiff of the supernatural) are the closest I really come to reading horror. I thought Griffiths did a great job with the atmosphere in this novel. Both the abandoned factory that overlooks Claire’s house, and RM Holland’s old house (loosely incorporated among the buildings of the state comprehensive where she teaches), are drawn in a compelling and creepy way. Plus, a lot of the plot takes place amidst a backdrop of sea frets, where anything could emerge from within the fog. Although Southampton’s coastal, I don’t live right by the sea and we don’t have those thick frets – but we definitely have fog more than we did where I grew up, so on a few occasions I was walking to work through this sort of weather, listening to the story of someone walking faster and faster through fog – someone who can now hear the sound of someone else’s breath, but can’t work out where it’s coming from…

I do most of my crime “reading” via the medium of audiobook. That’s partly because I got into the habit with the Hugh Fraser-narrated Christies, and partly because a good murder mystery is a great companion for my walk to work. I’m not sure that audiobook was the right format for this particular novel, though. Elly Griffiths tends to have people from all over the UK in her books – which is great, and definitely accurate to most British cities, but it forces the poor narrator to attempt accents ranging from Geordie and Dundonian to Posh Southerner, British Asian, Welsh, Irish, Generically Northern and so on. Someone skilled enough to do all these accents should probably be on Britain’s Got Talent or something. There are different voice actors for the different first person narrators – but that actually just means the non-point-of-view characters don’t have a consistent sound. The ghost story are great in audio – that narrator had clearly been given the brief “posh; sinister” and managed to make it suitably scary – but the rest, not so much.

Normally, I would recommend against starting a crime series with the first novel, since they are often only loosely related to one another and authors gain in skill and confidence as they go along. With the Harbinder Kaur novels, however, I think starting with the first novel is the wisest thing to do. If you meet Harbinder first in The Postscript Murders, you will likely be disappointed in her when you go back to The Stranger Diaries: bitter, judgemental, and prone to jumping to conclusions. She’s still not exactly friendly by the time The Postscript Murders rolls around, but she’s warmed up a bit, and is less prone to hating everyone and everything on sight. I dread to imagine what she would think of me, since her list of people she doesn’t approve of includes: tall women, people who keep journals, people who enjoy writing, women who teach, and anyone who has ever enjoyed an episode of Strictly. (There’s also a lot of rubbish in the sections from her perspective about how teachers only work 9-3 and get lots of holiday. I mean, it’s clear that Griffiths knows this is rubbish, since the teacher characters all work very long hours, including during school holidays, but Harbinder never seems to revise her opinion. She mentions it several times and I found it annoying each time, even though I know it’s something a lot of people believe).

Reservations aside, I enjoyed this very much, though not nearly as much as The Postscript Murders. I’m looking forward to reading Bleeding Heart Yard, the third in the series – though I will definitely be reading it, not listening to the audiobook, because it too has multiple narrators and I don’t think I can cope with all those different accent renderings again.