Murder at St. George’s Church by Lee Strauss is the 7th book in the Ginger Gold series, set in the 1920s. I’ve come rather late to this series, which has 17 books but am enjoying it. Ginger is a war widow who served in intelligence during the Great War, and her late husband left her with the title of Lady Gold. In this audiobook, Ginger’s good friend, the Rev. Oliver Hill, is preparing to get married, and two days before the big event, the choir holds practice when during the break, the director falls from the balcony, having been killed and shoved over the railing. Ginger immediately runs to the body, along with her good friend, Haley, who is studying to be a pathologist. Then Ginger is surprised to see that the police detective who shows up for the investigation is Basil Reed, whom Ginger had last heard from when he boarded a ship to South Africa six weeks before. He has been back a week and didn’t bother to tell her.
The rest of the book spends some of the time focusing on the murder investigation and the rest of the time focusing on the love triangle of Basil, Ginger, and Ginger’s new suitor. It made this book weaker than the prior books in the series.
I really admire the job that Elizabeth Klett does in performing this and the other audiobooks in the series. She uses excellent voices for the various characters, but even more impressive is her use of accents. Few narrators with English accents seem to be capable of handling regional American accents outside of Southern and Chicago, but Klett does an admirable job at this, as well as voicing numerous accents of different classes of society too.
I give this book four stars.
