Murder Before Evensong by Richard Coles review - A gem of cosy crime, murder in an English village and all

Cosy crime: either an oxymoron or the great British crime writing tradition of murder in a country village, with an amateur detective working more effectively than, though often with, the local police. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in St Mary Mead set the gold standard.

Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (2020) revealed how successful the formula still can be and now another celebrity author has launched his own cosy crime series.

Richard Coles was first famous in the 1980s as part of the Communards, whose dance version of Don't Leave Me This Way was the best-selling single of 1986.

Remarkably, however, he is probably best known as the Reverend Richard Coles, vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire, who has appeared on various UK television shows including Strictly Ballroom and Celebrity Masterchef.

Coles retired this year, just before his debut crime novel Murder Before Evensong was published. He has said in interview that there's an "enormous" appetite now for crime fiction because "it offers some kind of reassurance. It gives you familiarity in a world that grows unpredictably strange, and resolutions".

Coles, therefore, sets his novel in the familiar setting of an English village with a predictable cast of characters.

It's 1989 and Canon Daniel Clement has been the Rector of Champton St Mary for eight years. He is a "bachelor in habits, fussy and particular", who lives with his formidable widowed mother Audrey and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. Coles insists he hasn't based Daniel on himself. "He's much steadier than me," he says, "and he's more heroic."

Daniel has begun a campaign to "install a lavatory" at the back of the church. Despite support for the idea from Bernard de Floures, Lord of the Manor, there is considerable opposition from vocal parishioners, who argue that "St Mary's, a jewel of English perpendicular, singled out for architectural merit and pastoral beauty, has managed without a lavatory for four centuries."

The influential ladies of the church flower roster lead the resistance to the removal of the "heritage" pews at the back of the church. Ned Thwaite, retired headmaster of the local school, tells Daniel, "Told you this would cause a fuss. It's change."

Events escalate when Lord de Flores' cousin Anthony is discovered murdered in the church, stabbed in the neck with a pair of secateurs. As Daniel establishes a working relationship with the investigating Police Sergeant, Neil Vanloo, secrets from the past emerge and eventually it's Daniel, with his insight into his parishioners' habits, who uncovers the truth.

This is a gem of a crime novel, full of eccentric characters all centred around an empathetic, scholarly priest. Coles has already written the second in the series with a third to come. There can never be enough cosy crime.