I’ve read a few of Patricia Wentworth’s books but didn’t care for this one. Lois Latter married Jimmy Latter basically to get the house and be Lady of Manor... She was in love with his brother Anthony but wanted more. She is making all sorts of changes to the house and the family relatives that live there are being pushed out along with long time servants. After Lois is caught going to Anthony’s bedroom and making a play for him, she and Jimmy have a fight heard by everyone. The next day Lois is found murdered. Miss Silver is sent for by Jimmy to help the police find out what happened. She coughs her way to guiding the police in their questioning. ( )

Exactly three stars. While the manner in which Miss Silver collects her final clue to the murderer's identity worked in the 1940s, it's so utterly incredible today that it'd be cause for the MS to be firmly rejected by any publisher.

The standard country-house mystery, a basically unoriginal plot, the surprise twist concealed by a very limp curtain; nothing too taxing, but nothing out of place in its day and time. The strongly moralistic tone of the thing was, well, honestly I found it less heavy-handed than in some entries in the series. It's pretty much confined to the expected Honour Above Crass Materialism and A Village Knows and Sees All. Middle-aged bachelor Jimmy Latter is variously depicted as being on his uppers, accepting in marriage beautiful widowed gamine Lois, who is involved in a nasty lawsuit with her dead husband's family; then Virtuously Refusing the Gelt she wins in said lawsuit after her death. Despite the fact that she used a chunk of it to renovate his shabby home. Which he resents, since he liked the shabby way it crumbled around him.

You get it...he married Lois because she was a Damsel in Distress, and now she's got agency he doesn't like it one little bit. She's painted to be such a slimeball that he's Quite Right to dislike and resent her uppity way of making things fresh and new so she can enjoy them. A Man's Home and all that. ::eyeroll::

But she goes too far when she wants his relatives to move along, get themselves a new place to droop their depressing sadnesses, and generally make room for the Lady of the Manor...the job she was seeking from the get-go...to spread her wings. This seems to me to be a bit rich, since it's now her money that pays for things; presenting her as a selfish wretch for wanting to enjoy her home...well...yes, it's clear she wasn't the right wife for Jimmy, and his life was unpleasantly upended by her youthful prettiness and its attendant selfishness; but someone please tell me why he couldn't simply have said, "Darling it's marvelous that you've finally got this pile of dosh and lovely what you'd like to do with it, but I must insist that you pay attention to my not unreasonable needs." But then there wouldn't be a story. When she turns up dead, her loud strumpet of a henchwoman, a not-our-sort broad shown to be willing to Cheat. On. Her. Tedious. Husband! *shockhorror* (and not even shown to act on it, enough that she thinks about it is Shocking!) makes sure Lois's death isn't simply swept under the gentry's handy rug. Maudie arrives, Lamb and Abbott arrive, secrets are revealed, misunderstandings are rife, the couples who should be together either get there or are pushed that way.

I'm not the least bit averse to the coupling-up drive that inhabits former romance writer Wentworth's fiction. This time, however, it's simply too perfunctory, too splodged on the plot like runny buttercream frosting on a hot cake (GBBO reference), for me to feel the warm glow of sentimental pleasure as they go two-by-two into the sunset. The highly conventional, extremely judgmental nature of the author's ouevre is here a spinier presence for the thinness of the story-dressing over it.
Series mysteries lend themselves to illiberal world-views. By their nature, they uphold ma'at and the desire we have as a species to see wrongdoers who are actually wrong suffer for their actions. The killing in this book was, by its internal lights, so richly deserved that it was hard to see how Miss Silver would be able to deflect the Awful Hand of Justice from its obvious yet incorrect course. Given what the experienced reader of series mysteries, and of this author's works in particular, knows, the solution to the crime was obvious though how the puzzle was to be unraveled was not. And that "how" was simply not credible by even the most generous modern reader's standards.

Author Wentworth's 1910 debut novel, A Marriage Under the Terror, was set in the French Revolution and features a young couple falling in love against the backdrop of betrayals and misunderstandings compounded by the awfulness of the Terror. It won her a prize, which carried a substantial sum of money with it, and launched a career of some fifty years' duration. She died at 83, having completed the final Miss Silver mystery; it was not, a la Curtain, a farewell. But fifty years in the lists left us with a massive pile of reading to do. Much of it is in the public domain, and a lot of the Miss Silver mysteries are available for 99¢ which is a bargain. If you're not utterly repelled by the bygone-era conservative politics and social attitudes, the stories have their charms. ( )

Eleven books into the series and World War II is finally over. And nowhere is it more over than Latter End, a country house inhabited by strong-willed Lois Latter and her second husband, the besotted James, along with a motley crew of James' ersatz female relatives. Lois does not like these women, not at all, and her schemes to force them out are blatantly obvious to everyone except her clueless husband. That setup leaves no shortage of suspects when the loathsome Lois turns up dead. Chief Inspector Lamb and Inspector Abbott, whom we've met in previous entries in this series, are in charge of the investigation, which of course spins its wheels until Miss Maud Silver arrives to straighten it all out. A more straightforward mystery than earlier entries in the Miss Silver series, and a romantic subplot that knows its place, made this one an enjoyable read. ( )

This book was originally published in 1947 and is part of a series. While a lot of books by the author are listed at the beginning of the book, they are in alphabetical order, so there is no way to know the order in which they were written. The other book by Ms. Wentworth, which I picked up at the same time, is also from 1947.

Anyway, i enjoyed this book. I still think the chipped cup briefly mentioned should have been a major clue, but I guessed whodunit anyway, mostly because, like the author, I didn't want anyone who was a decent, unhappy person to suffer even more. ( )

Delightful little mystery with plenty of stunning banter, complex relationships, lovely characters, perfect pacing, and of course, our "revered perceptress," Miss Silver. ( )