Customer Reviews

Summer's Lease

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John Mortimer is an extremely literate and witty writer of books, screen plays, and other material, including the Rumpole series. This book is a bit different from his other books, including Dunster. "Summer Lease" is his best book as far as I am concerned. The protagonist is a woman named Molly Pargeter. One might not beleive the creater of Mrs. Rumpole (She Who Must Be Obeyed)could manage an authentic female protagonist, but he does.

Molly is an English woman married to a successful English man, successful enough to afford a villa in Tuscany for the summer--a summer's lease. Molly's semi-absent husband may or may not be faithful but they share an "unfriendly matrimonial bed." Her mostly grown children have their own lives, and her father living down the road has his own interests which don't include Molly.

Left with time on her hands, Molly begins to wonder about her absent landlord. What is he up to? By doing a bit of 'detecting' she discovers the answer. At the end of the summer's lease, she has also acquired personal insight into her own life and issues. I especially enjoyed the varous scenarios Mortimer depicts as Molly moves around Tuscany, tracking the landlord, or attending to her own business -- viewing paintings in museums, attending the horse races, walking along the dusty roads, etc. This book is a good "read."

I read this book because I saw the Masterpiece Theatre production on TV in the early nineties and fell in love with the characters and the story. This is the type of detective mystery novel where one can truly relate to the detective as she is an average person with a highly developed sense of curiosity. While I shared Molly's intense curiosity about her absent landlord and her outrage at the so called "water racket", I would not have gone as far as she did to satisfy that curiosity. Molly is rather reckless (if not stupid) towards the end and doesn't realize the consequences of her actions until too late - and even then chalks it up to coincidence. All in all the book is a quick and delightful read that will have you longing to travel to those Tuscan hills. I wish Masterpiece Theatre would rerun the film or make it available on video. You've got to see the film. The cast was so well chosen and the locations are beautiful, especially the terrace on La Felicita.

The book is set in Tuscauny, where an English family is renting a home. Odd things happen, water disappears, and then someone dies. The mother, Molly Partiger, becomes obsesses with getting to the heart of these mysteries, and with meeting her mysterious landlord. It is a particular pleasure to see Mortimer's love of Shakespeare come through in Molly's Falstaff of a father, and the Hamlet-like play-within-a-play which gives Molly the final clue to the murder. Interwoven with the plot is an homage to Piero della Francesca (although it has been written that Mortimer gets everything wrong about Piero's Flagellation). The book ends with typical Mortimer poigniancy. Summer's Lease is light in the way that a Tom Stoppard play is light -- an intelligent guilty pleasure.

I did love this book. Having spent a summer in Sienna in 1969, reading this was like taking a trip back there. I especially enjoyed the mystery surrounding an enigmatic painting. This is a good companion book to "Under the Tuscan Sun", and I must admit, I liked this better.

This is a quaint and entertaining novel. The characters are interesting and carry the story well. The plot is simple, but not boring and certainly not bad. The introspective thoughts and actions of Molly the forty year old protaganist who looks for love in all the wrong places, Hugh her "successful" attorney husband and Havorford Downs, Molly's rogue father are most captivating.

It's a lighthearted mystery in which the writer allows the reader to participate at any depth the latter prefers.

Descriptions of Tuscany are well done to the point that this reader could almost see lines of slim cypress lining a dirt road and smell the pungent aroma of a bottle of black rooster labeled Chianti. There were times while reading that I couldn't help but laugh out loud. There are some really funny moments in the tale.

Brits who read the novel will, I feel certain, fall right in line with the story. We Yanks, on the other hand, need a little time to acclimate ourselves to British verbal nuances. Surprisingly, though, it didn't hinder the reading enjoyment even a little bit.

This novel is one for a summer's day, with a glass of tea (forgive me, but iced tea) in hand. While the book will not be ranked with the geat ones of western civilization, it is fun. Truly a delightful experience.

This sun-drenched, garlic-scented novel has a subplot of water -stealing and chicanery and a main story of an Englishwoman who is looking for romance.

The main character is Molly, a large, slightly boring woman who becomes involved in real-life mystery and murder and yet is not touched by it, whilst a postcard, a portrait and a strage coupling of a toad and a snake move her deeply and harshly. She is a silly owman yet you like her. Her appalling father is, I think, the kind of man the author John Mortimer would like to be (or maybe is?), an irreverant, literary man with a childlike mischief and a high libedo.

A fantastic read on many levels.

Summer's Lease is a light mystery-comedy centering on dowdy middle class British housewife Molly Pargeter, who loves Italian Renaissance art and mysteries. She finds both when she rents a summer villa in Tuscany called "La Felicita". Molly is accompanied on the summer holiday by her less-than-willing husband and three children, along with her rascal of an elderly father, whom everyone wishes had stayed at home.

Molly becomes curious about the family whose house they are renting, having made the arrangements by mail - never meeting the owner in person. She encounters a number of British expats living in Tuscany, all of whom seem to know and respect the owner of La Felicita, but give few details of the shadowy landlord. Molly soon finds herself involved in a greater mystery concerning the disappearance of water at rented villas, plus a suspicious death or two. She solves all the mysteries, but also learns the consequences of prying into the lives of others.

Summer's Lease is well-written, and makes an entertaining good read. The book is almost identical to the 1989 TV miniseries, with only a few extra scenes, but greater exposition. Some miniseries viewers have complained they could not follow all the plot threads. The book does a much better job of sorting out who did what to whom and why. Recommended.

This is a wonderfully comic novel. Sometimes British humor is hard for me to relate to,
but the character Haverford is one of the funniest I've ever encountered. Meeting him
and the Old Count make this book worth reading.

A British family rents an Italian villa for the summer. Grandpa Haverford comes along
because he blackmails his son-in-law into bringing him. The daughter becomes ob-
sessed with the villa's owners and the mysterious goings-on with the town's water
supplies.

This is a great read!!

this book is fantastic. the masterpiece theatre production was awesome too. i would like to buy a copy of the video if anyone has one. this is definitely worth reading - and watching too!

If you're looking for a mystery without the usual godlike detective, this is worth reading. Molly's father is a riot.

Who would have guessed that Rumpole's author could have written such a lovely story?