Customer Reviews

Slight Mourning

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This isn't your typical twelve come to a dinner party murder mystery, but that is where it begins. Twelve came to dinner at the manor house and after that dinner, the lord of the manor, Bill Fent is killed in a car accident. That doesn't look like murder, but Sloane finds out from the irrepressible Mr. Dabbe that there were enough barbituates in Bill's body to kill two lords of the manor. So Sloane and the bumbling Crosby are on the hunt for a murderer. As with all of Ms. Aird's books, if you follow the clues you may be able to figure out who the murderer is, but that in no way takes away from the fun. There is enough "tongue-in-cheek" in each of her books to keep the reader chuckling all the way through. And oh what a gem Sloane's boss, Leeyes is! I really enjoy these English cozies. Each one is totally unique and enjoyable in it's own right.

Twelve people sat down to dinner at Strontfield Park, William Fent's ancestral home. But my midnight the host was dead - killed in a car crash as he was giving one of his guests a lift home.

The problem for Detective Inspector Sloan was the autopsy. For the victim, apparently, would have died anyway. Along with the cold cucumber soup, crown of lamb, raspberry cremets and a fine old port, someone had slipped the lord of the manor a dose of deadly poison.

This, the seventh in Catherine Aird's C.D. Sloan mysteries, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. As usual, Aird drops clues all throughout her text, so if you pay close attention, you too will be able to figure out what is going on. Constable Crosby provides his usual comic relief by being the worst and yet the most enthusiastic of police officers.

If you enjoy Ellis Peter's George Felse mysteries, you'll like this series too. If this series could finally be reprinted, I'd be a very happy person. So would you! Hope you can find this book somewhere.

Bill Fent, driving old Professor Berry home dinner, would have been just another Road Traffic Accident at Tappet's Corner for Inspector "Happy" Harry Harpe - that perenially depressed member of the Berebury Force, who's never seen anything to smile at in Traffic Division - just another accident on the way back from Berry's, one life gone and the life of another driver hanging by a thread. Unfortunately for somebody, Dr. Dabbe is *very* thorough in his work as police pathologist, so during the routine post-mortem, he found the poison somebody slipped to Bill Fent during dinner at Strontfield Park. If Dr. Washby hadn't been called away unexpectedly, Fent wouldn't have had to drive Berry home, and a poisoner might have got away with murder.

Now, of course, the case belongs to Harpe's friend "Seedy" Sloan and his raw assistant Crosby of the CID, working out who at a dinner for twelve could have poisoned the host without being seen. After attending the funeral, they have another loose end to worry about: the widow, hearing of their presence, fainted dead away, then shut herself up in her room - but it seems more like fear than guilt.

Who would want to murder Bill Fent, a respectable local magistrate burdened with an entailed estate? His next of kin seems to have had a good reason *not* to - both the owner and an adult heir have to work together to break an entail and start turning land into cash, and the Fents had had bad luck in meeting the requirements, what with the World Wars killing off family members at inopportune moments. But *somebody* thinks Sloan can make sense of it; before long, he has a second murder on his hands...

This isn't what I would call a country house party case, although Constance Parva is definitely in the country. The dinner guests were local worthies: the local doctor, his new bride (hence the reason for the party), the old rector's daughter Cynthia Paterson, Quentin Fent the heir, to name a few. Cynthia Paterson alternates with Sloan as the viewpoint character, filling in background information in a gentle way; as a rector's daughter, she's attended far too many funerals to concentrate solely on the service, and contemplates the attendees instead, with some of her father's taste for literature thrown in. (In one of Aird's many references to Italian art, the notion that Charity's opposite is Folly was always good for a sermon. That kind of thing.)

C.D Sloan and the comically brash and dense Crosby are back again. This time, they investigate the suspictious death of Bill Fent, who was administered a fatal dose of barbitutes, but got killed in a car accident first. Sloan and Crosby attempt to unravel who would want to kill the judge, as his closest relatives had reason not to, as well as how Fent was poisoned. Another murder brings Sloan closer to the truth as the motive for murder is discovered.

I am new to the Catherine Aird mysteries. This is the 3rd or 4th one that I have read and when I looked at the reviews, this one generally got fairly high marks. However, I found this one much more difficult for me to get through. In truth, I found the writing just too slow paced and redundant. It seemed that the same ground was covered again and again, and getting to the truth of who committed the murder was painfully slow. I did not guess the ending, which in truth, is always a plus for me regarding a murder mystery but the pace of the story out-weighed the surprise ending. The story is about a man who has an auto accident and dies. However, on autopsy they find poison in his system in the guise of barbiturates. There are a few too many characters to try and keep up with in this particular story (at least in my opinion) and none of them really standout. Even when the murder was revealed, I had to think hard about how he fit into the story. There is a second murder, and Aird does do a good job of bringing that murder into the circle of why it needed to occur as well as a potential 3rd murder that the hero of the book, Inspector Sloan, rescues from the clutches of the murderous fiend. The bottom line of why the murderer did it was sex and fear for his reputation. I found this novel OK, not great, but for fans of Catherine Aird (like myself), I tend to think that you can't always produce a winner every time out.