Rose’s Last Summer by Margaret Millar is a fun mystery novel that is about a faded actress’s death and the chaos that she leaves behind her. With her best days behind her, Rose bids adieu to her only friends, a noisy landlady and her psychologist and announces that she’s off to a new job as a housekeeper. Suspicions are aroused when she turns up dead in the garden of a wealthy doll manufacturer despite the coroner’s finding of a natural death.

Something strange is going on, and when another older lady disappears and there are threats of kidnapping and demands for ransom money as well as long lost relatives showing up, it is up to Detective Greer and psychologist Frank to get to the bottom of this complicated case.

Originally published in 1952, Rose’s Last Summer wasn’t quite as clever as I had been led to believe as I wasn’t surprised by any of the “twists” or the predictable outcome but it was a light, whimsical read perfect to kick back with on a warm summer’s day. ( )

Margaret Millar was married to Kenneth Millar, a.k.a. Ross MacDonald, and as such was overshadowed by her husband as an author. But since Ross MacDoanld is one of the greatest of all authors in the crime fiction genre that is not really a condemnation of her ability or her legacy as a writer. What is suprising is that as women have devoped a stronger identity as writers in the past 20 years that Margaret Millar has not seen her stature grow by leaps and bounds for her writing is extremely relevant and evolved. Her books are natural extentions of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. She uses sociological and psyhcological elements that advance the genre forward and elevate many of her novels past murder mystery novels to novels exploring the lot of women in the 1940's and 1950's.

In fact, the plot in Rose's Last Summer is excellent and the ending is well done. The characters are well defined and the conflicts between social classes and between men and women are subtley done. The insecurity of her characters and their sense of failure and frustration are the driving forces that makes the surprise ending not just a murder mystery cliche but a natural result of her characters and their story.

But in the end, it is not the story that Margaret Millar was able to tell, but the inner workings of, especially the female characters, that you remember. The struggle against lonliness and those that would tell them how they should act, as well as their failures and their losses that you remember. In the end the denoument is not as relevant to the reader as the characters they have come to know. You end up hoping that Rose and Ethel and even Willett will be okay and that they will find some happiness. ( )