Cover Her Face by P.D. James

I have been (very) slowly collecting the P.D. James books Faber published with the beautiful covers illustrated by Angela Harding. And by slowly, I mean I had a total of four. Two that I got secondhand and were so dirty they needed replacing, and two others. Hardly a collection at all really, but I figured I had time to acquire them slowly. I like to remind myself that there is no rush to collect books when they are in print. It keeps the mad book buying in check. Then it happened. Faber released the Adam Dalgliesh series with new covers. Without changing the ISBNs, might I add. They were coming out in instalments and I had only heard about the change after the first 9 or 10 had been reissued. I rushed to order the remaining four, and despite ordering a month before the new covers were supposed to come out, three of the four books that arrived were the new ones. What a disappointment! 

This is a longwinded way of saying how thankful I am that I was able to find seven more of the Angela Harding covers after that initial incident. There are fourteen books in the Dalgliesh, so I do not have a full set in the Angela Harding covers, but I am telling myself this is fine. Who knows! Perhaps I will find the others secondhand at some point in the future. Preferably without mysterious stains on them like the other two I have. I do hope so!

My takeaway is that if in future I do decide to collect a number of books in a series to either commit to buying them as they are issued or buy one per month until I complete the collection. Otherwise, just don’t do it. 

I think I have rattled on long enough about my little collecting conundrum. Let’s chat about the first book in this series, Cover Her Face.

Faber originally published Cover Her Face in 1962. The dust wrapper has a striking illustration by Charles Mozley of a woman’s face. With just a few brushstrokes the artist has perfectly captured the stillness of death. It is as striking as it is grim. Certainly a cover to grab one’s attention, but I’m not sure if I would have been attracted to it, though I do think the that cover both encapsulates the kind of sparseness that I find in P.D. James’s writing as well as the serious crime in this book. The Angela Harding covers do add a certain romanticised ideal to these books that make them more easily palatable, I think.

St. Cedd’s Church fête is held on the grounds of Martingale manor house on a July afternoon. What with running stalls, ushering nosy visitors out of the house, and checking on her bedridden husband, it’s a busy day for Mrs. Maxie, especially with guests staying over who have come up for the festivities. Oh, and the sudden engagement of her son and the parlour maid, which was not on the agenda. But the final straw is when the aforementioned parlour maid is found dead the next morning. Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is called in and the household is not at all helpful with the investigation. 

The P.D. James novels I have read have felt slow-paced for the genre, and this one was no different. These are quiet novels with few dramatic moments. That might be why when peace gets interrupted—as we know it must, these are crime novels after all—it hits all the harder. 

Dalgliesh is himself a quiet man. He is more than competent, working along with Detective Sergeant Martin who is junior to him in position, but not in age. Dalgliesh is as meticulous and methodical as one would expect of a Scotland Yard detective. He is also obsessive. Living and breathing the job to an extent that he  might not have done, had his wife and son not died. 

One of the things that always strikes me about P.D. James’s novels is how out of date they feel. That doesn’t quite explain it. Neither does calling her novels old or dated. What I mean is that I doubt I would be able to guess what year they were published in. The setting of this one is “a typical Elizabethan manor house” that is very well-staffed, especially for the time (57). It could be the setting for a novel from a decade or two earlier. But then there is the unexpected clash of the modern. In this case, it is the unwed mother working as a parlour maid, who ends up dead. If this was set in the interwar years, I don’t think you would find an unwed mother working at a house like Martingale, even in fiction. Especially not one who was allowed to have her baby living in with her. The parlour maid, Sally, had been recommended by the woman running the local home for unwed mothers, a Miss Liddell, and Mrs. Maxie is busy looking after her bed-bound husband, so the family do not pay much attention to the servants as long as they keep the house running smoothly. 

I won’t give any more details about Sally’s death, than what you would find out from reading the back cover copy. But I will say that I think P.D. James does a good job of subverting reader expectations regarding Sally. Well, to an extent anyway. Sally is our victim, so she certainly does not escape unscathed. However, there is no moralising lesson about Sally’s death being a punishment for her life choices. Thank goodness. She is a good mother, though perhaps not the best parlour maid, if the cook is to be believed. 

Martha had to admit that the baby was at first very little trouble. She put this down to Miss Liddell’s excellent training since it was beyond her comprehension that bad girls could be good mothers. James was a placid child who, for his first two months at Martingale, was content to be fed at his accustomed times without advertising his hunger too loudly and who slept between his feeds in milky contentment. This could not last indefinitely. […] Sally was beginning to spend more time with her child and Martha would often see her during the mornings, her bright head bent over the pram where the sudden emergence of a chubby leg or arm showed that Jimmy’s long periods of sleep were a thing of the past. No doubt his demands would increase. So far Sally had managed to keep up with the work allotted to her and to reconcile the demands of her son with those of Martha. (19-20)

I like that we get a glimpse of the woman that Sally was when her guard was down. With many murder mysteries, there is an unknowability to the victim, and this book is no different. Because the same woman who “screamed with laughter” at her son when he fussed over his food and “caught him to her in a whirl of endearments, loved and fondled him” also shows up to the fête in a similar dress to the daughter of the house, throws her engagement to Mrs. Maxie’s son in the woman’s face, in front of a table full of guests, and threatens to divulge more than one person’s dark secret if they fail to tow the line.

P.D. James answered my burning questions about Sally Jupp. Because as the story goes along I became more and more interested in solving the mystery of Sally. And thank goodness, Dalgliesh has the presence of mind to realise that to uncover a killer, he must first uncover the victim. The title, Cover Her Face is more than just a line from this book where a character quotes John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi. (Although, I should perhaps have read The Duchess of Malfi before even addressing the reference. Oh, well. Too late now!) The full line is, “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young” (IV, ii). There is the heavy suggestion that Dalgliesh, if not ‘cover her face,’ at least, look outside of Martingale for Sally’s murderer. But Dalgleish knows when he is on to something, and gives a most emphatic ‘no’. 

I had such wonderful time with this one that I did something I rarely do. I went ahead and started reading the next book in this series right away. I will have a review for that one up shortly. For now I will say that I enjoyed A Mind to Murder even more than Cover Her Face. I am very much looking forward to continuing on with this series, though I may have to skip some titles until I find those coveted Angela Harding covers!

Speaking of which, I have shared affiliate links to the current editions of Cover Her Face and A Mind to Murder. However, if you prefer the Angela Harding covers, I got mine from an online bookseller in the UK called Postscript Books. They are selling the first four Dalgliesh books together. (You can see them in the last photo.) This is not sponsored or an affiliate link, but I was really impressed with the care they took in packaging my orders, and I will always advocate buying from small businesses, like Postscript Books, when possible. It appears that sell a lot of publisher remnants, and they recently acquired some Handheld Press titles, but they also sell new, non-remnant books as well.

This blog post contains affiliate links for Blackwell’s. As a Blackwell’s Affiliate, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you decide to make a purchase through one of the links on my website. I recommend Blackwell’s because I use them myself. This helps support me in sharing—what I hope is—valuable content. Thank you for your support!

Tea on Sunday by Lettice Cooper

With a book entitled Tea on Sunday, what can you do but post your review on a Sunday, featuring photos of your own little tea party? Thankfully, ours was murder-free!

I had a great time reading Lettice Cooper’s Tea on Sunday. The book was not doing anything ground breaking. As it was originally published in 1973, Lettice Cooper did not push the limits for the murder mystery genre at the time. If anything, this book felt a bit dated. Even after I had checked to see when it was originally published I had to go back periodically to remind myself that the book I was currently reading was in fact that British Library Crime Classic that had been originally published in the 1970s. But, you know what? Not every book has to be doing something new and different. Sometimes new and different can be a bad thing, like when it is not doing it well, or when it is just being new and different for the sake of it. And Lettice Cooper does old and reliable very well indeed. This homage to vintage crime might not be the fabulous bit of writing one would expect from a Persephone Books author (not that I’ve read any of her other books), but it is a very satisfactory way to spend an afternoon. 

The story opens with a prologue, which begins…

There were eight cups on the tray. Alberta Mansbridge added the ninth, her own, the dark blue and gold Rockingham cup that her father had used till the day of his death. “As I hope to do till mine,” Alberta had said to Mrs Bramley on her first morning there. “So I shall always wash it up myself, then it will be no one else’s fault if it gets broken.” (17)

Well, we know what’s going to happen, don’t we? Before the guests arrive, Alberta Mansbridge will be murdered. As she would have needed to let the person in, and as she is nervous of being alone for the afternoon—which is in part why she always has people over for tea on Sunday when her tenants are out—she must have known her killer. It is quickly decided by the police that the killer must have been someone invited to the afternoon gathering. They must have arrived early, killed Alberta, left, and then returned later to huddle on the stoop with the others, waiting to be let inside. But of course, they wait in vain, because Alberta lies dead inside.

Set on a snowy February afternoon in London, this would be a great one to read in winter. Although I read this book just a week ago, we were experiencing a snowstorm at the time, so the setting couldn’t have been more perfect. Because I always enjoy when books have descriptions of nature, especially when it is of snow, I must share this passage. Alberta is gazing out the window, waiting for her guests to arrive.

She walked across to the window and looked out at the Square. The usually pleasant water-colour prospect was, on this February afternoon, either white or drab. The sky was drab, the pale stucco houses looked drab; the snow that had begun to fall at midday had already melted to a drab-coloured slush on the pavements and in the street, but in the Square garden the lawn was still iced with it; the bushes were rounded white beehives; every branch of a tree delicately supported three times its own thickness in half-frozen snow. (18)

Without having read the blurb on the back of the book, I had expected this one to be mostly set in Yorkshire, because the stunning cover is an old travel poster for the Yorkshire coast. The inspector in charge of the investigation, Inspector Corby, does travel to Yorkshire to get some answers into Alberta’s past and about the family business interests that have Alberta travelling back to her home town of Hithamroyd on a semi-regular basis. But Corby takes the overnight train and the trip does not take up much of the book, only 38 pages of the book’s 269. I only mention this because I had an expectation about this book that was not fulfilled, and at the time, I was a bit disappointed. My mum was born in Yorkshire and as I have not yet been, I always take a particular delight in reading about the place she grew up. If I had known at the outset I would be reading a mystery set in London, I wouldn’t have minded a bit. But as I said, I didn't read the back cover. I almost never do. If I had, I would not have had the expectation of a Yorkshire setting. The blurb mentions London twice and only refers to Alberta's "Yorkshire roots". That'll teach me for judging a book by its cover! Now, I’ll stop dwelling on what this book is not, and get back to what it is. 

Perhaps, the most interesting aspect of the story are the characters. Alberta’s eight guests are a motley crew, including her accountant, an ex-convict she was helping, her family doctor, the manager of her father’s company, an Italian playboy she was also helping, and who appeared to be moving in—both figuratively and literally—in hopes of helping himself to her money, her once good friend Myra with whom Alberta had recently had a falling out over that same Italian man, and her nephew and his awful, but very entertaining, wife. 

But I have to say that my favourite character in the book is Inspector Corby, who travels to Yorkshire himself, though his boss is always encouraging him to get the juniors to do the legwork. He suspects it is his tendency not to strictly follow the rules that landed him with Sergeant Newstead when his partner of five years went off to head a North London Station of the C.I.D.

To start on a case with Bob had been like slipping into gear. Newstead, Corby had already found out, was an efficient detective; thorough, accurate in his observation and painstaking. But costive; he seemed to have swallowed the book of words whole and got a permanent stiff neck from it; so far no fun in him. Oh well, it was early days yet. (37)

We know from the start that we are in for some fun with Corby, though! Newstead’s serious nature sets off Corby nicely, and he does prove to be a reliable partner.

While this was not my absolute favourite Crime Classic—that would has to be Christianna Brand's London Particular, which I recently reviewed—I did read this book remarkably fast, in just a couple of sittings. This one is slow-paced but so well-written that I sped straight through it, right to the climactic finish.

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of Tea on Sunday for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

This blog post contains affiliate links for Blackwell’s. As a Blackwell’s Affiliate, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you decide to make a purchase through one of the links on my website. I recommend Blackwell’s because I use them myself. This helps support me in sharing—what I hope is—valuable content. Thank you for your support!

London Particular by Christianna Brand

London Particular by Christianna Brand may just be my new favourite book among the British Library Crime Classics. While, as Martin Edwards suggests in his introduction, it is up for debate whether Brand strictly follows the rules of a ‘fair play’ puzzle in this book, this was the author’s own favourite among her books for good reason. I do think the murder is solvable for the reader, but it would take someone who is exceptional at discarding the superfluous. And apparently, I do not fit into this category. But I’m fine with that, because this one kept me guessing right to the last sentence.

Dr. Edwin Robert Edwards, lovingly referred to as Tedward, and Rosie Evans, the younger sister of his colleague, are out on a typically foggy November night in London, trying to find their way to a dying man. Tedward has received a strange phone call from Rosie’s house by Raoul Vernet, a dinner guest visiting from Switzerland, urging the doctor to come quick, he has been hit by a mastoid mallet. Tedward and Rosie arrive to find Raoul Vernet is dead.

Rosie enlists the help of family friend, Inspector Cockrill, to aid the police in their investigations, because as dear Cockie is soon to find out, there are only seven suspects and all belong to the Evans family or are close friends of theirs.

There are so many things about this book that I enjoyed. Let’s talk about the setting first. As suggested by its title, this novel begins on a night ravaged by the soot laden fog that was typical of London in the 1950s. In December of 1952, the same year this book was published, London experienced severe air pollution from the combination of cold weather, an anticyclone (high pressure air close to a land mass with lower pressure air surrounding), and windless conditions which trapped airborne pollutants, creating a deadly smog, which killed as many as 4,000 people and made thousands more sick. Coal was mainly to blame for the great quantity of pollutants in the air and the Clean Air Act of 1956 came about in direct response to the event that came to be known as the Great Smog of 1952. All of this is to say that the fog described in this book would have been thick yellow, green, or black fog often referred to as a ‘pea-souper’.

It may be hard for today’s readers to imagine how dense London fog would have been during this time period. The title London Particular, is a reference to chapter three in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. A character says, “This is a London particular” in response to a new-comer to London asking if there was a fire, because “the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen”. By referencing a novel published one hundred years earlier, Brand suggests that this is the same dense, pollution-filled, fog that Londoners had been suffering since Dickens’ time, and no doubt even earlier than that. (Here's my short and sweet review of Bleak House.)

Earlier this month I read another book set during the 1950s, Patti Callahan Henry’s The Story She Left Behind. In it the Great Smog of 1952 is well-described from the perspective of an American tourist who is not accustomed to a London particular and is unaware that the London air is not always so toxic. This novel is not entirely set in London, the characters quickly flee to the Lake District for their health, but if you enjoy historical fiction I cannot recommend this one enough. The brief description of London’s landmarks veiled in thick fog were of particular interest to me, as I have not read anything else set during this historical event. (You can find my review of that book on Instagram and Goodreads, if you are interested.)

But back to London Particular… Brand describes the family dynamics with vigour and humour, breathing such life into the house that it seems a shame to sully it with the ugliness of a murder.

Tedward strolled out after her, laughing. ‘Never mind, Til! You cope with the old girl, I'll see myself out.’ Gabriel followed him, barking gaily, under the chronic delusion that anyone in an overcoat was necessarily about to take him walkie-palkies, and Annaran, the Siamese cat, who was very sillily called after the film Annaran the King of Siam, poised ready to dart out to certain death under the traffic wheels of Maida Vale. ‘Gabriel! Annaran!’ shouted Matilda in despair above the din. The telephone rang, Emma reached boiling-point, Rosie screamed out from her attic that if that was Damien on the phone she would come down and speak to him, and out of a first-floor window flew a long-sleeved woollen nightie. A strong smell of burning pastry arose from the basement. ‘My God, what a house!’ said Tilda. From the hall came a last shrill yelp of disappointment as Tedward shut the door in Gabriel’s face; followed by a squall as it closed upon Annaran’s shining tail. The fall of the nightgown had been followed by a heavy silence in Mrs Evans’ room. Today of all days! — Granny was always at her most impossible, after Worse than Death. (45-46)

I had to include that hilarious glimpse into the Evans’ household at its most chaotic. It actually made me laugh out loud while reading, which is something I rarely do.

The other thing I really enjoy about this book is Brand’s writing. The plot is so finely tuned that she continues to play with reader expectation throughout. She even teases the reader by foreshadowing events to come. 

In the long, white firelit drawing-room the victim bowed and smiled and reeled off his devoirs before the serious work of the evening should begin; within the radius of one fog-bound mile, were these seven people, one of whom was very shortly going to murder him. (56)

Again, she teases what is to come when early on in the investigation, Cockie is questioning some suspects for the first time.

A little fish of doubt swam into Cockie's consciousness and hung about there for a moment waggling its fins at him; but he was more interested in Thomas than in Melissa Weeks and so he passed on and never knew how much trouble and tragedy might have been saved if he had noticed it. (77)

Although, I usually find this type of blatant foreshadowing is too heavy-handed for my liking, I think Brand makes the technique work because it is both carefully placed, and used sparingly.

Despite Brand’s skill at creating finely-tuned plots full of twists, this does not feel like a plot-driven novel. Everything that happens in this book is driven by believable decisions made by the characters. Even with a number of characters confessing to the crime, it does not feel like some sort of ploy to confuse the reader. It does of course add confusion, but each of the confessions are believable in the moment because there is some truth behind each confession, and because all of the suspects are so closely linked, there is always someone who is trying to protect someone else. 

Speaking of characters, Cockie appears in six other novels by Brand, five of which have been republished by the British Library, including Green for Danger, Suddenly at His Residence, Death of Jezebel, and Tour de Force. London Particular is the fifth book in the series and Tour de Force, which I read before reading this one, is the sixth. (Here’s a link to my review of Tour de Force.) Although, an earlier case is mentioned in this one in which Inspector Cockrill crosses paths with Inspector Charlesworth, the police inspector who is officially working on the case in this book, there are no spoilers for that novel. I had no problem enjoying the books in this series out of order.

While there are some aspects of this novel that date it, there are other aspects that make it feel ahead of its time. We find out early on that Rosie is pregnant and is very open about seeking an abortion. Abortion was not legalised in England until 1967. I’m willing to bet that Rosie referring to her unwanted pregnancy as “a most frightful muddle” and seeking an abortion from the family doctor, while continuing to unashamedly give in to her passion for men, must have shocked some readers when this book was first published. Perhaps all the more so because Rosie is a delightful and charming character, who is living her life unapologetically, and is more intelligent than she makes herself out to be. After all, it was her idea to ask Cockie to investigate, and you cannot help but like and approve of Cockie. 

I cannot recommend this one enough! It has an atmospheric setting, twist, after twist, likeable characters—all of which you will be rooting for, even though one of them has to be the murderer—and some really solid writing. Oh, and no clunky explanation at the end. Thank heavens!

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of London Particular for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

This blog post contains affiliate links for Blackwell’s. As a Blackwell’s Affiliate, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you decide to make a purchase through one of the links on my website. I recommend Blackwell’s because I use them myself. This helps support me in sharing—what I hope is—valuable content. Thank you for your support!

Murder as a Fine Art by Carol Carnac

After reading Murder in Vienna, written under Edith Caroline Rivett’s pen name, E.C.R. Lorac, I approached Murder as a Fine Art with eager anticipation. But I have spent much of my reading time lately feeling tired, which may explain why this one published under her lesser known pen name, Carol Carnac, at first, failed to grab me. However, I prevailed, got some sleep, and by the midway point I was really enjoying this classic mystery set in March.

After the first and second Minister of Fine Arts died shortly after taking up the position, Humphry David is the third in line. It is his job to get things in order, despite the fact that he thinks the whole idea of a Ministry of Fine Arts is rubbish. In fact, when the idea for the Ministry had been broached, David had voted against it. 

Regardless of personal opinion, he must do the job he has been given. When David spots some irregularities in the Ministry’s correspondence, which lead him to suspect there may be some forgeries in their collection, he invites Henry Fearon, one of the experts from Scotland Yard who specialise in forgeries, to investigate. But before Fearon can get to work, Scotland Yard is called in on a more pressing matter. A civil servant has been found crushed beneath a marble bust. The bust of the last Earl of Manderby is generally hated by the staff. The civil servant was not exactly a favourite either.

On one topic, the Minister and the dead man, Pompfret, were of similar mind and that is regarding that marble bust.

“The thing is too utterly revolting. It offends one's sense of values, and the sheer virtuosity of the treatment renders it the more deplorable. It should not be here at all. It labels us as Philistines.”

“It’s a work of art,” said David unhappily. “One mustn’t let personal prejudice intervene..."

“I’ve often wondered if it would topple off with a little encouragement,” said Pompfret. “It’d be a wonderful sight to see it bounce down the stairs. It must weigh several tons.” (33)

Even the detectives, Detective Inspector Lancing and Chief Detective Inspector Julian Rivers, have a low opinion of the marble bust sculpted by Canova. Although, of course, they are critiquing it as it lays in pieces amongst a crime scene.

Together they lay at the foot of the noblest state staircase in London: both with broken necks. Earl Manderby’s neck had severed below the chin; detached from its monumental shoulders, among chips and blocks of laurel leaves, stylised curls and fragments of outsize features, the marble head lay grotesquely close to Pompfret's, while Pompfret's blood clotted on the black and white blocks of the pavement. (46)

One of the things I would not have expected from a mystery set in a Ministry of Fine Arts is that most of the people who work at the Ministry have a specialised appreciation for art and almost no appreciation for that which falls outside of their specialty. For example, David who is known for being a “passionate addict of the arts”—which is what lead him to being given the job as Minister—has a passion for Holbein drawings and Dürer engravings. Having never studied contemporary art, he admits to feeling a “clinic distaste” for it (18). I got a kick out of all of the jabs at contemporary art and Canova’s sculptures. One gets a sense that Carnac had a great time trashing certain styles of art and artists in the writing of this book.

As I mentioned earlier, David is not the first Minister to be appointed. The two men who held the position before him left their own legacy, shall we say. The first, Joyce-Lawrence, had been given a strict budget in which to stick to, and so he filled the collection with representative pieces of the various schools and periods, and concerned himself less with the actual artists included in the collection. In his office he chose contemporary pieces, referred to by the typists as “the Minister’s “funnies” (18). When Fearon asks about them, David explains,

“You see, Joyce-Lawrence had a sense of humour. These pictures aren’t signed. He didn’t have the name of the painter attached to any of them, and his private list has been lost—if it ever existed. It is my own opinion that they’re all anonymous, for the best of reasons.” (20)

The second Minister was no better. He was not interested in art at all, but he worked wonders in the Ministry’s finances, cutting overspending left over from his predecessor by firing all of the experts. The result is that the Ministry is left with a collection that no one knows much about. The staff who work directly with the art collection might know a painting well enough by sight, but it seems unlikely that most would be able to tell the real thing from a counterfeit. A bit of a problem when pieces in the collection are regularly out on loan to galleries across the country. 

And now, here is the current Minister, David, trying to make sense of the Ministry he has been assigned. He is such a kind and helpful person, that I did not think too much of him—except to suspect him, of course, because he seemed a great deal too good. When I was trying to figure out why the first half of this book dragged a bit, I noticed that just about every scene that David was in my interest started to wane. He is so much of a do-gooder that I found him a bit boring. Although, if he was a person—not just a character in a book—he would be the type to have many friends, and not a bad word could be said about him. 

The second half of this book picks up and feels a lot like a country house mystery to me. The Ministry of Fine Arts may be situated in London, but we don’t see much of the city besides a few scenes near the end where the detectives are rushing around asking questions and chasing leads. Lancing and Rivers spend a lot of time searching Medici House, the building that holds the Ministry, for clues, and ways a person could sneak in or out of the building. And of course, just about everyone who works at the Ministry is a suspect, minus the dear typists, of course.

If you like country house mysteries, I think you would enjoy this one. But don’t expect tea served by a loyal retainer in the drawing room. Refreshment can be found in the canteen with the rest of the house staff, minus the night watchmen, Titmarsh and Smith, who prefer to keep their own company in the bowels of the building.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I was impressed with the solution to Pompfret’s death, and while I did not come close to figuring it out, the clues were there in the text, so that one could solve the crime themselves, in theory. Carnac’s skill with description gave me a clear picture of Medici House, but also the crime scene, which I sometimes find writers either gloss over, so as not to make things too gruesome, or go too far with it. Carnac provides a good balance, I think. 

I won't say the tense conclusion made up for the slow beginning, but it did make me want to return to this one again sometime. I would like to see if it was just the mood I was in while reading, or if the first half really did drag. Next time, perhaps, I will have more patience with the ever kind and helpful David. If you have read this one, I would love to hear your thoughts on the pacing and anything else you care to discuss about it!

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of Murder as a Fine Art for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

This blog post contains affiliate links for Blackwell’s. As a Blackwell’s Affiliate, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you decide to make a purchase through one of the links on my website. I recommend Blackwell’s because I use them myself. This helps support me in sharing—what I hope is—valuable content. Thank you for your support!