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.