Eighth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in
Australia); a homage to the novels of Agatha Christie.
That's both good and bad. The obligatory setting of an isolated
country house works well, and all the expected stock characters are
here (some beautiful young men, a jolly hockey girl, a scandalous lady
novelist, a crusty old military man, a foreign poet, some dotty old
ladies). But we're detached from the usual support characters; no Bert
and Cec, no adopted daughters, no Inspector Jack Robinson.
Lin Chung, Phryne's lover met in the previous book, returns as her
companion at the house party, and I fear that in bending over
backwards to avoid racism Greenwood falls instead into orientalism and
exoticisation: neither he nor his servant ever makes a single wrong
step, the servant is an expert in the martial arts who effortlessly
restrains people with a touch, and Lin himself is prone to go off on
flights of exotic philosophy (not to mention endlessly comparing the
incomparably beautiful Phryne to a Manchu princess). Mind you, Phryne
never gets anything wrong either; she always teeters on the edge of
being a Mary Sue, but for me at least hasn't quite toppled over. I'd
still be happier if she made the occasional error, or perhaps
disagreed with someone who turned out to be right.
The mystery plot is, as one would expect from a Christie homage,
convoluted, perhaps too much so; everyone has a secret, and I felt
that there wasn't enough in the way of information to let one identify
the villain. Structurally, most of those secrets are revealed after
the main plot is resolved, rather than (as a more conventional mystery
would do it) being used gradually to remove characters from contention
as the principal evildoer; this leads to a curiously anticlimactic
final chapter. Greenwood also sets out to subvert expectations about
the sort of people one meets in a Christie book, and largely succeeds,
though one character's name is far too much of a giveaway. Things
come screeching to a halt towards the end for a sudden lecture on
geology, but there's a well-described trip through a cave which
reminded me of Nevada Barr's excellent Blind Descent.
Not entirely typical of the series, but might be a good entry point if
you don't want to start at the beginning. Followed by Raisins and Almonds.
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