June Thomson

"It was, on the surface, a congenial gathering in Elizabeth Hamilton's pretty drawing room the day of the party. Even her father, Felix Napier, was being friendly to the irritating Steven Bradley. Dear, disorganized Dodie had introduced an attractive new teaching colleague called Kate into their midst. Ruth, the diminutive local doctor, kept up a lively conversation, and Elizabeth's solicitor husband David completed the circle of comfortable hospitality.

"Within a few days one of this company would be dead -- and the rest under suspicion of murder. A murder so unexpected, brutal and calculating that even the formidable Detective Inspector Finch found it utterly baffling."
~~back cover

"A murder so unexpected" is an excellent description. Knowing you're reading a murder mystery, the reader eagerly follows the very generous clues that might possibly lead to sussing out the victim in advance. And those clues are all wrong. The victim is the least expected of all of the group.

Even worse, the murder almost certainly seems to have been done by an unknown intruder -- certainly not anyone the victim might have known, even slightly. A random burglary gone wrong? At first it appears to be the case, but then ... little details begin to add up to the murderer being known to the victim.

The plot builds slowly on these bare bones, pulling the reader into a morass of investigation that seemingly leads nowhere ... until suddenly things begin to fall into place. Since this is a murder mystery, the genre demands the murder be solved in the end, and indeed it is. But the reader (like Detective Inspector Finch) remain mostly in the dark until the very last moment, when all is revealed to the surprise of everyone involved.

An excellent mystery, that so many of the more modern ones fail to live up to.… (meer)

This is the fourth collection of seven pastiche stories I have read by this author, another such collection supposedly found in a trunk by a descendant of Doctor Watson, and consisting of Holmes stories unpublished during their partnership for one reason or another, and which are based on mentions of other cases in the published stories. As with the other collections, these read as authentic and both Holmes and Watson comes across very well. These are mostly ordinary cases - mercifully, no sign of Moriarty - and some of them in fact based on relatively harmless and pretty much non-criminal deceptions (The Ainsworth Abduction, The Ferrers Documents, The Camberwell Deception), with a couple of more dramatic murder stories (The Wimbledon Tragedy, The Barton Wood Murder). Great collection.… (meer)

"A MYSTERIOUS 's', WHITE ROSES AND A GRAVE

"A highly confidential assignment took Detective Inspector Rudd to the country village of Barnston. Posing as a civil servant on holiday, Rudd was to secretly protect retired British spy Alec Mercer from an unknown assassin. A blurry World War II snapshot enclosed with a threatening note suggested that the would-be killer's motive was revenge. But for what? Rudd knew it concerned a Resistance fighter called 'S', a bouquet of white roses, and something that happened in France during the winter of '43. But he didn't know who would appear as the Angel of Death in this quiet Suffolk town -- a man, a woman, a stranger ... or a shockingly familiar face."
~~back cover

Excellent plot, combined with a glimpse into English village life in the '50s ... what's not to like? And who could have seen that ending coming?… (meer)

This is a full length Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel by an author who has produced several sets of short stories in this genre, which I have mostly liked. This novel, however, was disappointing. Despite starting quite strongly with good descriptions of the Sussex coast, where Holmes has retired to keep bees, and what looked like a decent air of mystery being built up, it never really developed and the plot resolution around tensions between the generations of a local family was not really a mystery at all and quite mundane, albeit sad. There were discrepancies between dates in the background detail in some cases and I was also irritated, as I was in one of the author's short stories, about a situation where Holmes was speculating about future women bishops and Prime Ministers in a way that neither he nor almost certainly anyone else could plausibly have foreseen in 1908 - just too knowing and jarring. Finally, there seem to be rather a lot of cars around for 1908, even in descriptions of events taking place many years earlier than that date.… (meer)