Corpse Path Cottage

I’ll admit, I went into *Corpse Path Cottage* expecting a pastoral murder mystery—maybe a modern *Midsomer*, with more rain and fewer jump scares. What I got instead was far more unsettling: a story about the stories we tell ourselves to justify the worst impulses. Margaret Scutt doesn’t just drop a body; she dissects the moment *before* the body falls, when the idea of murder is still just a writer’s idle fantasy. Mark Endicott is the kind of protagonist you’ll love to hate—smug, self-mythologizing, and just clever enough to think he’s in control. When the killing starts, his reaction isn’t horror but *opportunity*, and that’s where the book gets its teeth. James Langton’s performance is crucial here. He doesn’t *act* so much as *unfold*—his delivery is measured, almost clinical, which makes the rare moments of urgency hit like a slap. The production is clean, though I’ll dock half a point for a few odd pacing choices in the first act, where the deliberate slowness occasionally tips into drag. And while the Dorset setting is vivid, I wished for more textual variety in the villagers’ voices; a few secondary characters blur together in ways the print version might not. Still, the final third is a gut-punch, with a twist that doesn’t just solve the crime but *recontextualizes* it. This isn’t a book for fans of neat endings. It’s for listeners who like their mysteries to linger, like the smell of gunpowder on a damp morning.