Eighth and final book in Ferrars' Andrew Basnett series.
Andrew Basnett is a retired professor of botany who gets
accidentally mixed up with murders. This is classic amateur sleuthing,
though he usually manages to remain on good terms with the police; in
the later books, they've sometimes even heard of him, and have a
grudging respect for him.
In this volume, Basnett goes for a relaxing holiday in a small seaside
town, but first runs into his writer nephew Peter Dilly, then gets
invited to the dinner party of the vastly popular writer Simon Amory
with whom Dilly is staying. Amory's a bit of an odd fish, but things
really get started when his sister-in-law is found shot, and Peter's
both the last person to see her alive and the first to discover the
body.
There's a lot of cutting interpersonal observation, reminding me of
the way people broke down in The Crime and the Crystal (the third in
this series, set in Australia). All the necessary clues are present; I
spotted the major plot point not directly identifying the murderer
before it was revealed, but had a misapprehension about the identity
of the murderer and was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.
The ending is something of an anti-climax: once Basnett has pointed
out to the police both his theories and the evidence that will confirm
them, the actual search and arrest take place off-stage. Basnett is
not, of course, an action hero, nor is he working for the police, but
it seems a shame that Ferrars couldn't have contrived to bring him
on-stage. This has been a repeated minor problem in the series; like
most of the sort of detective fiction I prefer, the stories are
essentially logic puzzles rather than character pieces, but I enjoy
Ferrars' writing of characters enough that I'd like to have seen her
tackle the bluster of the discovered murderer too.
This was written towards the end of Ferrars' life, and there's a
certain sense of tiredness, but she knew her stuff and this is still a
satisfying story.
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