Customer Reviews

Hindsight

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Peter Dickinson is an astoundingly prolific writer of British mysteries and young adult fiction most active from the 1960's through the 1990's. He is best known for his mastery of the British mystery and for that he still deserves a wide readership as his books are as good and in many cases better than many current offerings. His time period is generally the first half of the twentieth century and his milieu is the upper class or the dying English colonies. As this is the case, he spends a great deal of time in that halcyon period between the wars.

Paul Rogers is a novelist who runs into an old acquaintance quite by chance during an evening of social obligation. A chance remark by the friend takes Paul back to the war years when Paul was kept safe from the war at a remote boarding school. While there a tragic, accidental death occurs. A death where Paul is within a whisker of being a witness and knows all the people affected. Now years later, he suspects that the death was in fact murder, but knows that memory can be a slippery, ephemeral customer that deceives at every turn. Paul begins unravelling those events from long ago and finds not only murder, but the bittersweet pleasures of Hindsight.

Hindsight is a good, solid, psychologically driven English mystery set in that bastion of the upper class, a boarding school, populated it turns out by gentlemen and players but sorting out which is which is a challenge. Not Dickinson's best by any means, but solid and a pleasure to read. Seek out other books by Dickinson, even those out of print. You won't be sorry; I know I wasn't.