I mentioned this book in a recent edition of Whatcha Reading? and said,

I have started A Most Agreeable Murder and it is extremely silly and absurd and I’m turning pages. Or pressing a button to do so, whatever.

There are glowing, I presume bioluminescent, frogs. Their glowy slime is likely used for face cream to create a similarly glowy complexion. These frogs are unique to the town and make a lot of noise.

I am reporting in that this book is zany. Zany to the max. There’s baloney in its slacks.

Shana: Sarah, do you need to be rescued from this novel? Blink once for yes.

Sarah: Lol. It is the definition of unhinged.

I’m trying to write a review and I sound like an 8 year old telling you about a dream I had.

Prepare ye for me to indeed sound like a sleep-drunk 8 year-old telling you at length about a dream I had. While reading, I looked like every confused gif you’ve ever seen.

On the surface, I thought this would be a somewhat self-aware historical mystery: a local spinster goes to a ball and, oh crumbs, there’s a murder. She’s determined to solve it.

I’ve tried three times to write a summary, and I can’t because there’s a significant amount of off-the-rails “yes, and” attached to every sentence. Here, for example, is the cover copy:

Feisty, passionate Beatrice Steele has never fit the definition of a true lady, according to the strict code of conduct that reigns in Swampshire, her small English township—she is terrible at needlework, has absolutely no musical ability, and her artwork is so bad it frightens people. Nevertheless, she lives a perfectly agreeable life with her marriage-scheming mother, prankster father, and two younger sisters— beautiful Louisa and forgettable Mary. But she harbors a dark secret: She is obsessed with the true crime cases she reads about in the newspaper. If anyone in her etiquette-obsessed community found out, she’d be deemed a morbid creep and banished from respectable society forever.

For her family’s sake, she’s vowed to put her obsession behind her. Because eligible bachelor Edmund Croaksworth is set to attend the approaching autumnal ball, and the Steele family hopes that Louisa will steal his heart. If not, Martin Grub, their disgusting cousin, will inherit the family’s estate, and they will be ruined or, even worse, forced to move to France. So Beatrice must be on her best behavior . . . which is made difficult when a disgraced yet alluring detective inexplicably shows up to the ball.

Beatrice is just holding things together when Croaksworth drops dead in the middle of a minuet. As a storm rages outside, the evening descends into a frenzy of panic, fear, and betrayal as it becomes clear they are trapped with a killer. Contending with competitive card games, tricky tonics, and Swampshire’s infamous squelch holes, Beatrice must rise above decorum and decency to pursue justice and her own desires—before anyone else is murdered.

Have you seen those crafting clips where someone screen prints a photograph onto fabric and then embroiders onto the image, adding flowers and ribbons to make it more three-dimensional? I could take that entire summary and embroider it with all the bizarro-world elements that hide beneath each sentence, but I’d also have to add tinsel, glass ornaments, and some blinky lights.

Yes, the dead guy is Croaksworth. Yes, they live in Swampshire. But that is not all.

If you go in expecting a straight forward historical mystery, that is not what you will find. There are hats that are also dog beds while being worn, complete with puppy. There is a prankster father who invented the whoopie cushion though he calls it by a different name. There’s a rich independent woman who runs an ad-hoc animal rescue and writes plays. And there’s the Steele family: entailed estate, three daughters, etc.

Indeed, Beatrice, the lead, is obsessed with crime and London violence which makes her “unsuitable for marriage.” This is because a neighbor’s ancestor founded the town she lives in. That ancestor wrote a book on etiquette and created the town to enforce the standards he made up. You might have guessed that these standards are patriarchal nonsense and also really weird. So,  yes, the town is obsessed with etiquette, but it’s more in the sense that they all agree to adhere to a multi-volume, extremely large guide to proper behavior and enforce it on one another.

Fortunately the town, and therefore the cast of characters, is small. And there are plenty of coincidences to keep them rotating in one another’s orbit. There are characters who are clear references to Austen characters, and possibly also characters from Clue. And there’s local rival who is gorgeous and whose personality is “jealous,” but also holds a lot of social power because her family is wealthy and because she announces the Color of the Year.

I can’t even describe my face when I read that. Seriously, every confused gif ever.

The true crime that Beatrice is obsessed with are newspaper columns written by a Sherlock-esque figure who chronicles his mystery-solving exploits alongside his ‘assistant,’ who is Indian  and, as it turns out, not at all the assistant. He’s the competent one, the brains behind the other dude’s bombast. And what a surprise, he is in Swampshire. Solving a murder with the person who is obsessed with his former partner’s exaggerated expertise.

I could keep going for a few thousand words about how the description says one thing, and it’s true, but also is also so much more that you wouldn’t believe. And while the book is clearly an homage of sorts to Sherlock, Austen, and country house mysteries, it isn’t so much wry or self-aware as it is completely detached from reality and high on its own supply. The story is going to go places and you can tag along, but don’t expect coherence. Expect mayhem.

For example:  early in the book, upon learning that an Eligible Man (Croaksworth) will be attending a local ball, and that said Man’s parents died, the heroine asks how they died.

Again, she is rather morbid, obsessed with crime.

This is the answer:

“They had just moved into a new mansion in bath with 59 bedrooms. Unfortunately the two of them got lost on their way to breakfast. Their servants didn’t find them until it was too late. They had wasted away.”

No one blinks an eye! Of course they got lost in their own mammoth house and died. Seems understandable!

Then, the next line of dialogue includes, “Do the inspectors suspect foul play?”

And Beatrice’s marriage-obsessed mother replies, “No birds were involved.”

Ba-dum-bum!

I swear I kept looking at this book wondering if it was making me high. My head was all floaty and my hair felt weird.

At one point, the pretty sister who must marry the guy with dead parents put two drops of belladonna in her eyes to make the pupils pop. And that’s perfectly logical. Oh –

So aside from the degree to which this book has baloney in its slacks, how is it as a novel? Peculiar, engaging, weird, and uneven. It drags in the middle while it functions as a mystery alone, the two main characters interviewing guest after guest, each casting suspicion in every direction including upwards toward the ceiling. All the silliest parts are temporarily set aside for the investigation, and it’s a bit of a slog until the plot gets goofy again.

This is the book version of “Too Much! No, Wait, Add More.” It is doing all the things, almost all the time, lurching from parody to homage to satire to outlandish buffoonery. As much as I was baffled by the over the top scenes, those ended up being the parts I liked most. When the ensemble is together and absolute mayhem is happening it is bewildering and bodacious, and one of the strangest, silliest, most absurd books I have enjoyed.

So if you’re thinking, Sarah, what did I just read? 

My reply: I have no idea.