Tag: England

Review 2793: #NovNov! Victorian Psycho

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Here’s another one for Novellas in November. Let me just say right off the bat that if you have a weak stomach, this is not the book for you. Not only is it gory, but even before it gets gory, it has disturbing details.

Winifred Notty has arrived at the home of the Pounds to work as governess for the children. Almost immediately, she has some thoughts that seem odd, and she says she’s repressing her dark self.

The Pounds are not nice people. Their son Andrew is stupid and spoiled. The older child, Drusilla, is pretty much ignored. Mrs. Pounds treats the servants with disdain and soon is jealous of Winifred because Mr. Pounds likes her. Winifred is certainly making up to him, but her intentions are different than we are led to think.

The narrative style is light and humorous, but despite her efforts to be good this time, Winifred’s behavior gets more and more bizarre. Sometimes she can’t remember what she’s been doing. We know from the beginning that everyone in the house will be dead within three months, so it’s just a matter of seeing how that happens.

Judging by her two books, Feito has a fascination with the dark side of humanity. I think this one was a bit too graphic for me, though.

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Review 2790: #RIPXXI! Faithful unto Death

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Faithful unto Death is the fifth book in Graham’s Inspector Barnaby series and the only one so far that I didn’t remember from the TV series. Like some others, it gets to Barnaby slowly and murder even more slowly.

Neighbors wonder at the disappearance of Simone Hollingsworth, the beautiful wife of wealthy Alan Hollingsworth. It’s unlike her to have missed two appointments one afternoon and fail to show up for bell practice. Yet, no one really knows her. She flits from one activity to another and stays home alone while her husband works. In her absence, Alan is missing work and turning into a wreck. But when Barnaby acts on a report, Alan says his wife has gone to visit her mother, and Barnaby seems unwilling to go further even after learning her mother is dead (which I found odd). Meanwhile, the whole village thinks Alan murdered his wife.

Brenda Brockley, the girl next door, has a big crush on Alan, and when he goes off unexpectedly, she follows him to Heathrow Airport. There, someone spots her.

Then Alan apparently commits suicide, but something tells Barnaby otherwise. It begins to look like Simone was kidnapped and Alan was trying to ransom her.

In the meantime, Brenda still isn’t home. Eventually, she is found dead in the Heathrow parking garage, apparently hit by Alan’s car. And where is Simone?

I had an idea I knew what was going on in this one, but Graham convinced me I was wrong, and then she turned the tables again and it turned out I was right all along! Pretty good trick!

As usual, the characterization is really good and the plot complex. Another good one for Graham.

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Review 2789: No Fond Return of Love

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Dulcie Mainwaring is just recovering from the shock of her engagement being broken off (albeit quite a while ago) when she decides to attend a conference. She does part-time academic research and indexing, but a throw-away thought that she prefers researching live subjects proves significant.

At the conference she meets and befriends Viola Dace almost against Viola’s will. Viola’s profession is a bit murkier than Dulcie’s, and she implies that she had an affair with one of the speakers, Aylwin Forbes, the author of several scholarly articles and the lecturer on “Some problems of an editor.” (The lecture titles cracked me up. There’s another on “Some problems of indexing.”) Aylwin is thinking more about his impending divorce than his lecture and has a dizzy spell during it. (Later on, I had my doubts about Aylwin’s supposed affair and reputation, because he remembers his encounter with Viola as one kiss, whereas Viola is wondering why he hasn’t returned to her after his divorce. It’s hard to get a good idea of this, despite Aylwin clearly being susceptible.)

Dulcie’s “research” becomes more obvious as, having decided she is attracted to the handsome Aylwin, she begins visiting people and addresses associated with him. Although for some reason this seems odd but harmless in the book, today we call it stalking. Aylwin, who keeps meeting her, has a confused impression of a pleasant face but can’t remember her name.

Viola actually ends up moving into the home that Dulcie inherited from her mother, although she complains about how far it is from the action and doesn’t really seem to like Dulcie. Also moving in is Dulcie’s young niece Laurel, who would rather live in her own bed-sit, but her parents won’t let her.

As Dulcie and often Viola traipse around checking out Aylwin’s relatives and their homes and following up rumors, Dulcie meets her old fiancé Maurice, who seems to be reconsidering his decision to break it off, Viola seems to get less interested in Aylwin, and Aylwin is attracted to someone even more unsuitable than either his ex-wife or Viola.

These ordinary people seem believable with all their oddities and inconsistencies. I liked Dulcie even though she is a stalker. The other characters not so much. There’s a lot of sly humor in this book.

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Review 2783: #RIPXXI! #1949Club! Crooked House

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Crooked House is my second book for the 1949 Club and another one for RIPXXI. Some of Agatha Christie’s books are better than others, and Crooked House is pretty darn good. In fact, Christie commented that it was one of her favorites. It’s one of the few of her stand-alone books that I think is just as good as the best Poirot and Marple mysteries.

As the war is wrapping up in Egypt, Charles Hayward realizes he loves his friend Sophia Leonides and tells her that when he returns to England, he will ask her to marry him. Two years later, he cables Sophia to meet him for dinner in London and later reads that her grandfather, Aristide Leonides, a very rich old man, has died. Sophia joins him at dinner anyway and tells him that she fears her grandfather was murdered. Since most of the suspects are family members, she won’t marry him unless the murder is solved. She asks him to help.

Charles’s father is the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and he thinks Charles could be helpful since Aristides was indeed murdered, poisoned when someone substituted eye drops for his insulin. So, the A. C. suggests that Charles accompany Chief-Inspector Taverner to the estate. The near-ninety-year-old Aristides has remarried Brenda, a much younger woman, and it’s clear that the whole household wants the murderer to have been Brenda or Laurence, the tutor whom the family believes is her lover.

Aside from them, the household consists of Sophia’s icy father Philip and her theatrical mother Magda, her emotional uncle Roger and arctic aunt Clemency, her younger siblings Eustace, crippled by illness and bitterness, and young Josephine, who likes to spy on people and brag about what she knows. Finally, there is Edith de Haviland, the sister of Aristides’ first wife.

Although everyone knows how the estate was left, there are unpleasant surprises. First, the will that was read to all of them a year ago is missing. Then, someone knocks Josephine unconscious. Finally, a totally different will is sent to his lawyer by one of Aristides’ old friends.

This one is twisty, and I had no idea who the evildoer was. Although Sophia seems like one of the least knowable characters, there’s a reason for that. This is a good one.

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Review 2778: Six Impossible Things

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

The third book in the Wayne family trilogy, Six Impossible Things centers on Nicholas, who in the first book, returned from military service determined to try to keep the family house and be a guardian to his youngest sister and brothers.

It’s ten years later. Most of the family is away now, but all of them are returning home for the wedding of Miriam Arkwright to an Austrian count. Nicholas goes to the airport to pick up his sister Julia, who has spent the last two years studying music in Rome. At the airport he is admiring a lovely girl when Julia arrives with a bundle of packages. She hands him an airline bag and goes back to get more packages. Then Nicholas is accosted by a large, rude man, who tells him he is holding his fiancée’s bag. Nicholas says his siter gave it to him and he wants to make sure it isn’t hers before handing it over. The man, who is with the girl Nicholas was admiring, insists that Nicholas just took the bag to meet his girlfriend and becomes abusive. Julie comes back and realizes she has given Nicholas the wrong bag. They exchange, but somehow when they get home, they find they have the wrong bag again.

Nicholas asks Julia to write the girl, Elaine Morley, a note telling her he’ll bring her bag if she meets him. Instead, she arrives on their doorstep, having broken with her fiancé, Sir Kenneth Springer, and left without taking anything with her. Knowing that Kenneth Springer will descend upon them, Julia suggests she take up an offer of her old music teacher to lend his house to wedding guests, whom she and Elaine will tend to, and the girls move to that house.

Soon Springer arrives. To add to the chaos, Joey Helyon has returned to town to shoot a documentary, a more long-term way to help Elaine must be found, Julia has two young men courting her, and even Joey gets romantic.

This is a delightful light read. After three books, Nicholas deserves a happy ending.

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Review 2774: #RIPXXI! Murder at the Spirit Lounge

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Another book for RIPXXI! Ex-nun Nora Breen encounters her friend Detective Inspector Hilary Rideout, and he asks her to come with him to the home of Doreen Chimes, a spiritualist. She has made a complaint of a theft, and Rideout asks Nora to come along as his “chaperone.”

Nora is interested to find that several people think Mrs. Chimes is legitimate, including Rideout. He is invited to a séance at her house to which Nora, as an ex-nurse, is summoned because the medium has collapsed. Mrs. Chimes is dead, having collapsed while using a planchette. Attending the event are Rideout, Lady and Miss Baybrooke, Colonel Fulford, Freddie Grace, and his unexpected date Sybil Sparkes. Mrs. Chimes died as the planchette spelled out “Eve.”

Nora begins to suspect foul play because she has noticed strange red patterns on Mrs. Chimes’ hand. It seems as if someone at the séance must have done something, because no one else was in the room. Before they get very far in the investigation, though, there is a bizarre incident at the Baybrookes’ hotel. Nora witnesses Miss Baybrooke running wildly through the hotel. She seems to be shouting at no one. She finally throws herself out the window, but Nora spots a spectral-looking soldier on the fire-escape. Lady Baybrooke is found dead in bed, her asthma inhaler filled with powder.

In trying to find an Eve, Nora and Rideout learn that Miss Baybrooke was engaged to a flyer during the war, Evelyn Leyton, a patient in the hospital that the Baybrookes’ estate was requisitioned for. He had mental problems, and after Lady Baybrooke made her break it off, he committed suicide.

As the investigation continues, more links are found between Evelyn Leyton and the séance attendees, including Rideout, who knew him. Someone seems to be taking revenge for his death, as the attendees begin dying strange deaths. Nora becomes concerned for Rideout.

This is the second Nora Breen novel. Although I prefer some of Kidd’s other books, I like Nora and Rideout and some of Nora’s friends. The damp seaside town is evocative. I figured out the name of the killer fairly quickly, but the killer was in disguise, and I didn’t figure out who that person was. I found the novel entertaining.

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Review 2772: The House at Old Vine

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

The House at Old Vine is the second book in Norah Lofts’ Suffolk trilogy. Like the first book, it changes narrators, but as each section is considerably shorter than the first section of the first book, the effect is of linked short stories.

The novels follow a house and a family through time, beginning in the Middle Ages. This one begins sometime before 1496 and ends in 1679 and has half a dozen narrators. Each section is separated by an Interlude, which briefly tells more about what happened next.

In 1496, Josiana Greenwood tells the story of her life and her doomed love. Some of the characters from the previous book are still in the periphery. Josiana is a bastard child whose mother refused to tell her parents the identity of her child’s father. Her grandparents have treated both her and her mother like the lowest of laborers, but when she is 13, her grandfather wants to sell her off to a much older man who disgusts her. To protect her, her mother takes her to the nuns at Clevely, where she is educated and meets her true love. We know from the beginning that her love, Walter Rancon, is going to be burned by the church as a Lollard, but the story goes back in time to divulge other facts and secrets, including the connection to the family of the original serf who accumulated the property, Martin Reed.

In 1565, the background of the story is the reign of Elizabeth and a Catholic priest in hiding. Elizabeth Kentwoode is a child who has been thoroughly spoiled by her grandfather. She is quite a vicious child, and she shows what she will do to keep her string of blue beads.

In 1620, Elizabeth Kentwoode, now a redoubtable woman sometimes called Madam, selects Barbara Hatton to be the wife of her nephew John. Barbara is in love, but shortly after the wedding, Elizabeth lets her know that John has a long-time lover, a bar maid, who looks a lot like Barbara.

In 1645 during the English Civil War, Anthony Flowerdew is a spy for Parliament trying to find Royalist supporters when he comes to stay at the Old Vine, now a respectable inn which had first been run by Madam and now by Mrs. Kentwoode (Barbara). Anthony falls in love with Barbara, now a widow with a son, and decides to quit being a spy.

In 1670, Ethelreda Benedict is a girl from an island in the fens who has barely ever met anyone besides her father when he dies. She has to leave the island and eventually gets a position at Old Vine, now a boys’ school run by Anthony Flowerdew and his stepson Chris Kentwoode. A sort of leech on the place is Barbara’s relative Canon Hatton, who while everyone has plain fare, sits in his room and eats only the best food. Yet the others think he has nothing.

In 1679, Oliver Stanton, one of Anthony Flowerdew’s old students, breaks with his father and returns to Old Vine hoping to get Flowerdew’s help in finding work. There he finds Flowerdew as an old man struggling to support the school by himself with Ethelreda Hatton now doing all the work and the Cannon still hulking by his fire. Chris Kentwoode has died, and the number of students has dropped off. Oliver takes a job as a teacher there and soon begins to feel sorry for Ethelreda, who is overworked and mistreated by her husband.

Some readers may find this format keeps them from being involved in the characters, but I felt some interest in some of them. Although it would have spoiled some surprises, I would have liked to see a chart tracing the characters’ relationships, at least the ones from the last book, as sometimes it was difficult to follow how they connected to the original characters.

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Review 2770: #RIPXXI! Written in Blood

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Here’s another book for RIPXXI! It’s hard to tell whether I would have found this fourth entry in Graham’s Barnaby series even more effective than I did, being so familiar with the TV version that I knew practically everything that was going to happen. I could even picture the actors in some of the parts. Still, I enjoyed this one a lot.

The Midsomer Worthy writing club is trying to decide who to invite as a speaker, knowing full well that no one ever accepts. They finally decide on the blockbuster fiction author Max Jennings. But Gerald Hadleigh seems upset by the decision, although he agrees as club secretary to write the invitation.

Everyone is surprised when Jennings actually agrees to come. The club members are strictly amateurs. Senior citizen Rex St. John is writing about the adventures of a hit man but gets hung up on describing his weapons. Intimidating Honoria Lyddiard is writing a history of her distinguished family. Her quashed sister-in-law Amy Liddiard is writing an adventure novel. Brian Clayton sees himself as an intellectual and is writing an avant-garde play. Sue Clayton, his beleaguered wife, is writing a children’s book about a delightful dragon. And Laura Hutton is pretending to write something to be in the club because she’s in love with Gerald. And what is Gerald writing? I don’t think it ever says.

The afternoon of the meeting, Gerald visits Rex and asks him not to leave him alone with Max. The evening seems to go well except that Gerald doesn’t say much. Rex tries to perform his assigned task when everyone has left except himself and Max, but Max pretends to leave with him and once he’s gone through the door, shuts and locks it. Rex waits outside for a while wondering what to do but feels as if someone is watching him and eventually leaves.

The next morning Gerald is found dead upstairs in his bedroom, his head brutally smashed. Oddly, although most things seem to be in place, the police find that several drawers are empty and a suitcase missing.

Although Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby has been told that Gerald is a retired civil servant and widower from Kent, he can find no trace in records of his marriage or of him, for that matter. And he also can’t track down the location of Max Jennings, who reportedly left around midnight.

As usual, Graham takes her time developing her characters, some of whom have fates they richly deserve. In fact, one of the differences of the book from the episode is that she spends some time at the end on some fitting endings, in particular for two loathsome characters.

Graham is wickedly funny as she skewers writing clubs and a high school drama teacher’s pretentions.

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Review 2768: #RIPXXI! The Methods of Lady Walderhurst

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

It took me a while to find information on R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril (RIPXXI) for this year, since they are now only active on Instagram and Threads, where I am barely active or not at all, respectively. But here is my first book for this challenge, which runs from September 1 until the end of October.

When I was looking for an adult book by Frances Hodgson Burnett for my Classics Club list, I read that The Methods of Lady Walderhurst was a sequel to The Making of a Marchioness, which I enjoyed very much. When I finally began reading it, though, I became confused because it begins before Emily Fox-Seton’s marriage, and The Making of a Marchioness ends quite some time after it. Furthermore, it had been years since read TMofaM, but the book seemed very familiar.

As it turns out, this book was written as a sequel to the original Marchioness, which apparently ended with the betrothal. Later, the books were combined, and the Persephone copy that I read years ago must have been a combined edition. That explained to me why when I originally read the first book, it felt as if I was reading two—one a romance and one a dramatic suspense novel.

The Methods of Lady Walderhurst begins shortly before the wedding of the naïve, open Emily Seton-Fox, a well-born but poor errand runner for rich women, to Lord Walderhurst, a middle-aged marquis. Almost immediately, the subject of Alec Osborne comes up. Osborne is a distant relative who has considered himself Walderhurst’s heir. He has a disgraceful past, and Walderhurst dislikes him. He has married a Eurasian girl named Hester, and eventually they come to England on a visit from India.

Emily, now installed as Lady Walderhurst, is a friendly, guileless creature, and as she knows they are not well off, she talks her husband into letting them live in a vacant house on the estate. She does not realize how much Alec Osborne hates her.

Then Walderhurst has to travel to India on business, and Emily invites the Osbornes to move into the big house. She finds she is pregnant, and from that point Osborne begins plotting to kill her, working with Hester’s Indian maid. Hester herself is aware of his feelings but feels more ambiguous because of Emily’s kindness, which alternaturely infuriates her and softens her.

Where will it end?

From a romance novel in the first book, this story moves right into sensation novel territory. Although it describes Emily as childish and almost stupid, it really invokes the reader’s sympathy toward her. I enjoyed it just as much the second time. Warning: it does not portray its Asian characters in a positive light, but then again, there’s Alec.

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Review 2767: The Blue Sky of Spring

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

I wanted to read something super light, so I picked up this book, the second in Cadell’s Wayne family series and the only one I hadn’t read before. This one takes place a year after The Lark Shall Sing, in which all of the Wayne family returned home after their older sister Lucille decided to put the family home up for sale.

Cliff Hermann, an American playwright, arrives in Greenhurst to deliver a package to an old lady. He has been encouraged by his friend Robert Debrett (Lucille’s Wayne’s husband) to call on the Waynes, but he’s not in the mood. Miss Dryden-Smth, the recipient of the package, is abrupt and seems uninterested, but as he leaves, he thinks she looks ill.

Nicholas Wayne at 21 has taken on the position of father figure to his three preteen siblings. He has opened a successful travel agency and owns a third of the family home. He is in love with Estelle Dryden, whom he has known all his life, but although she cares about him, she’s not sure of her feelings. He finds her upset. Her aunt, Miss Dryden-Smith, has died, and at the last minute, she attempted to change her will, leaving everything to her son instead of Estelle. It’s not that Estelle wants the money, but no one knows who that son could be or that proper Miss Dryden-Smith, apparently a spinster, could have had a son no one knows about. All anyone knows is that a man delivered a package just before she died, a man in a big black car who was wearing a sling on his arm.

On an expedition to the races with Estelle and her brothers, 12-year-old Julia Wayne spots Cliff Hermann wearing a sling. She is certain he must be the man who delivered the package. Unfortunately, he is on the way to make a bet, and she stops him from getting there in time, so he is angry and displays a nasty temper. But when he sets his eye on Estelle, he changes his tune and soon has come for a visit.

For her part, Julia has a schoolgirl crush on Estelle, who is teaching literature at Julia’s school. She has made Julia interested in a school subject for the first time in her life. Julia confides to Cliff that she is writing a poem about Estelle for a school competition and will present it to her if she wins.

This novel features a romance, a mild mystery, and bitter disappointment for two people. I have to say that I didn’t like Cliff or the way he conducted his pursuit of Estelle.

It was nice to check in with the rest of the family, although the novel doesn’t spend much time with some of them. Of the trilogy, I suspect this novel is going to prove to be my least favorite. It did make me cry, though, which is always a good thing.

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