Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025) by A. Carver

Well, it has been about a year since the publication of A. Carver's third novel in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, The Dry Diver Drownings (2024), which differed by shining the spotlight almost exclusively on Alex Corby – while her great-aunt Cornelia took a backseat. The various locked room murders and impossible situations were also less complex than those found in The Author is Dead (2022) and The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), but that's because the story had so much more to offer than a tangle of miracle crimes neatly bundled together. From letting Alex tackle a case mostly on her own without her great-aunt at her back to the solution with a rug puller of a motive.

Carver's fourth Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow novel, Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025), is not so much change from the previous novel as it's a complete departure. Alex and Cornelia are mostly background characters, who don't really come into play until the end, but the various, double-layered locked room hangings can be meted against the dozen impossible crimes making up The Author is Dead and The Christmas Miracle Crimes.

The backdrop is the remote, extremely culturally isolated and lonely old-world English village of Hempel's Green. A place where time has difficulty getting a foothold as it "had kept the skyline clear of mobile phone masts and wind turbines, no matter what advantages they might bring." Only concession to the modern world is a "a tech shop" selling and repairing pre-millennial appliances like "fax machines, dial-up modems and brick phones." Tony Castle inherited a house from his grandparents in Hempel's Green and decided to temporarily move in to get away from personal troubles, but notices something wrong about the village and its aging, shrinking population – "desperately needing new blood" ("...but never wanting it"). Tony was taken under the wings of Miss Kathy Hark, village spinster ("...because she was maybe forty and single"), who introduced him to the village customs and some of its more normal members. So he receives the shock of his life when he drops by Kathy's house to find her body with the murderer presumably still inside. What ensues is a game of sneak and run through the house between Tony and the unseen murderer, but, when he finally comes out, Kathy is hanging from a light fixture. And the murderer escaped "through two layers of locks."

Detective Inspector John Peveril, newly transferred to Hempel's Green, believes it to be a suicide considering the body was hanging inside a locked room that's inside a locked house. Peveril's suicide theory is strengthened when Kathy's closely-guarded secrets is brought to light. A secret Tony unbeknownst shared with Kathy. Tony becomes determined to find her murderer, despite Inspector Peveril's lack of interest and joins the Knocker's Night organizing committee. Kathy was not only one of its members, but headed a faction wanting to modernize Knocker's Night in order to expand its appeal. This is, of course, opposed by a faction determined to preserve the history and traditions of Knocker's Night ("...history does not exist to be palatable"). Even without knowing the exact details of Knocker's Night, I sympathized with the traditionalist faction. Sure, add some frills and flowers to the gallows or tie nooses from multicolored ropes, but why do away with the gibbet That's a perfectly fine gibbet! The gibbet stays!!

Hangings at Hempel's Green is longer than the previous three novels and can be roughly divided in three parts of about a hundred pages each. That's why I'm glossing over a lot of details and characters. So the first part is to introduce the cast of characters, giving a look around the village and present the first two, of four, locked room hangings. Another member of the organizing committee is murdered under impossible circumstances at her home echoing the first murder. That comes down to the body first being seen through a window and ending up with a curtain cord around her neck inside a bolted room. A noteworthy part is Inspector Peveril's hilarious false-solution dismissing the case as a freak accident involving a door being slammed shut so hard "to cause a security chain on the doorframe to fly up and fall into place in its slot." However, the second and third part are the best parts for two very different reasons.

The second part delves into the customs, traditions and delightful local legend at the heart of Knocker's Night, but also the struggles the committee faces to keep the tradition alive with a graying, dying population and calls for change – while preparing what could be the last Knocker's Night. So the second-part builds up towards the yearly Knocker's Night with its ancient customs, strange costumes and the traditional procession up Gallows Glade to hang three effigies. These kind of isolated communities with their own cultural off-shoot rituals and festivals is something I have come to associate over the years with the Japanese detective story, especially the anime-and manga detective series, e.g. Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998). So it's fun to see a distinctly modern, Western locked room mystery take a swing at one of these fictitious anthropological treasures as a stage for murder. More importantly, the preparations for Knocker's Night and everything leading up to the event itself serves as stage to present the third, marque impossibility of Hangings at Hampel's Green. I'm not going to describe it, or give any exact details, but the theatrical staging of this third hanging is as original as how it was pulled off. A tailor-made solution for a tailor-made impossible crime! That's always good for extra bonus points in my book.

That brings the story the third and final part in which Alex and Cornelia finally get to play their part. Alex made a few brief appearances during the first and second part, but Cornelia doesn't appear until the last leg of the story. However, before they can reveal what really happened, the murderer has one more quiver, or in this case a length of rope, to create a fourth locked room situation in a place called Windmill House. A place that had been thoroughly searched, bottom to top, securely locked the place up, but, when they returned, they found a body inside casually dangling from a rope – like "a perverse magic." The plot is not done twisting and turning as Inspector Peveril gets an opportunity to redeem himself as a detective and delivers an elaborate, not entirely implausible sounding false-solution as the official police verdict. Alex and Cornelia, of course, hold all the cards in the end that provide all the answers. And, considering what came before it, the last chapter is a lengthy one as it needs to take its time to clearly layout everything that happened, how and why.

So let's begin with the meat of the plot, the quartet of inexplicable hangings. Like I said, the third hanging during Knocker's Night is the centerpiece of Hangings at Hempel's Green as an impossible crime novel. An impossible crime original in both concept and execution. The first and second locked room hangings are slightly simpler affairs, but only by comparison to the third and liked the complications that helped to create the second locked room. A great piece of entanglement! The fourth and final hanging didn't get the room it perhaps needed, being placed so close to the ending and perhaps the impossible murder should have ended with the third one on Knocker's Night. It would have been a great and dramatic climax to the killer's little murder spree, but just as a locked room, it benefited from the same quality as the third one. Another trick tailor-made for the occasion!

So, as a locked room mystery, Hangings at Hempel's Green definitely is a return to the first two novels with their galore of miraculous crimes, but, as Alex points out, "there's whodunnit and whydunnit too, you know." I honed in on the correct murderer early on in the story, but couldn't make the connection between the who and why. No idea why, but, for some reason, it took longer than it should have for that to click into place. That was not for a lack of clues, hints or a lack of fair play in general, which remains one of the main draws of this series. You know, beside the galore of locked room murders and other impossible crimes complemented by the crime scene maps and diagrams. So, once again, the plot and story is up to scratch with the first two novels, but there's a big but. Cornelia was already sorely missed in The Dry Diver Drowning, but here both Alex and Cornelia are largely absent (working off-page), until the closing stages. Tony simply is not a great replacement for Alex and Cornelia. An interesting choice for a fallible, emotionally invested detective, but not a character who should have taken their place in an already longer than the previous novels. Maybe it could have worked if Tony's narrative had been interspersed with Alex going home to report and Cornelia making comments from an armchair with a mystery novel on her lap, but their mostly off-page presence made Hangings at Hempel's Green feel more like a standalone mystery than an Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow novel. That's bound to disappoint a few people.

I recommend reading Hangings at Hempel's Green as a standalone mystery that just so happened to feature Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow, but it's main attraction are the four inexplicable hangings, the intricate web that has been spun between them and, yes, the overall characterization of the village itself. I just really missed Alex and Cornelia. I hope they're back, front and center, in their fifth novel or maybe short story collection with those unrecorded cases like "The Devil's Throat Incident." Well, I guess we'll find out in about a year's time.