Constable Evans

About the Constable Evans series

Evan Evans is a young police constable who leaves the bustle of Swansea for the quiet of Llanfair, a village at the foot of Mount Snowdon in North Wales, after his policeman father is killed in the line of duty. Quiet does not last: Llanfair turns out to be stuffed with rival chapel ministers competing for souls, a flirtatious barmaid, and no fewer than three other men named Evans — Evans-the-Meat, Evans-the-Milk, and Evans-the-Post — all before the first body turns up among the hikers on the mountain above the village. Evan investigates each case with patient, unglamorous police work, more interested in understanding his neighbors than showing off, while slowly becoming part of the community he was only supposed to be passing through.

Rhys Bowen wrote this series before Molly Murphy or Her Royal Spyness, and it shows a gentler, more purely comic side of her writing: the mysteries are cozy village puzzles, but the real pleasure is the ensemble of chapel-going, gossiping, endlessly bickering Llanfair locals, and Evan's slow-burn romance with schoolteacher Bronwen Price (complicated by the arrival of glamorous outsider Sergeant Watkins' sister-in-law). Welsh language, landscape, and small-town Nonconformist culture are rendered with warmth and a light satirical edge rather than exoticized. It's a ten-book series that never outstays its welcome, ending on its own terms rather than fizzling out, and it remains a favorite entry point for readers who want Bowen's voice before she found her two longer-running heroines.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Evans Above. Evan's relationships — especially his romance with Bronwen Price and his standing in the Llanfair community — develop steadily book to book, so reading in order rewards you, though each mystery is self-contained enough to follow if picked up out of sequence.

The series is complete at ten books, written between 1997 and 2006, and Rhys Bowen has not returned to it since starting the Molly Murphy Mysteries (which began partway through, in 2001) and Her Royal Spyness. Readers who enjoy this series' small-town Welsh setting and ensemble comedy but want more books afterward should move on to Molly Murphy for Bowen's next long-running character.