Rainbow's End

When a brash antiques magnate arrives in the quiet English village of Middlehope and sets about remaking it in his own image — buying the manor, seizing the church organ, elbowing his way into every local institution — the community closes ranks against him with a polite but implacable coldness. When his body turns up in the churchyard, almost nobody grieves. The real mystery isn't who had motive — practically everyone did — but who finally acted on it. Ellis Peters builds her story around that unsettling question: how much resentment quietly accumulates in a place that prides itself on civility?

What makes this slim novel rewarding is Peters at her most observant. Her prose captures English village life with a dry, affectionate precision that never tips into caricature, and she structures her story so that character revelation and plot revelation happen simultaneously — you understand the crime because you've come to understand the people. At just over two hundred pages, Rainbow's End is compact without feeling rushed, the kind of book that trusts its readers to pick up on what's left unsaid, which turns out to be quite a lot.