At just past the halfway mark in this book a main character discovers a dead body in a house in 1937 London. He goes to a neighbor and asks for a telephone, they don't have one, he's directed to another neighbor who does have a phone. He dials 999 and requests police assistance.

I threw down the book and howled about anachronism and "how young is this author, anyway?!" Then my husband looked up the fact that London has the oldest emergency phone system in the world, it was instituted in 1937. My howls are dimmed but not extinguished. The average joe would have no knowledge of this brand new system that had just been created. And I have never come across the 999 thing in any 30s or 40s novel I can remember reading.

Later in the book a main character is speaking to Duke SoandSo and says something like, "You don't mind if we go out to the garden, Duke?" She's supposed to be a well educated young gentlewoman who has been slumming with the communists. But no matter what her political sympathies I trust she would know to refer to her host as Your Grace rather than Duke, like some sort of American gangster.

I finished the book to see who dunnit and which way the protags were going to jump. I won't be pursuing this series. ( )

Like someone trying to re-do the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, and failing dismally. ( )

Kind of negligible. The author has read Sayers. Lord Edward has a nice fast car and talks about sleuthing, has an older brother who is a duke and so forth. There are some differences between Lord Edward and Lord Peter and between Verity Brown and Harriet Vane, otherwise this would be a pastiche. But the writing is pedestrian, albeit competent, and the milieu is not evoked convincingly. ( )

This mystery, first of a series set in the 1930s and featuring an "odd couple", one of whom is an aristocrat and the other a middle-class communist, struck me as rather clunky in style (the early parts in particular spend too long in explaining explicitly what many readers will know already) and the puzzle itself is by no means outstanding. However, the later part of the book does improve somewhat, and I will probably read the later books in the series at some point. ( )

Reasonable crime fiction series by someone who spent 30 years commissioning other people's books ( )