1990 historical detection, second in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher
series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne takes on the
case of a son whose mother is worried he'll murder his father, and
then the father is indeed murdered; and she tracks down a kidnapped
child.
There's possibly a slight slump from the driving energy of the
first book, and the promise of the title isn't really borne out (there
is one flying sequence in this book, but most of that comes in The
Green Mill Murder).
The light-hearted cosy style is always a slightly uncomfortable fit
for tales of poverty, vice and depravity, and where there's an actual
pædophile involved it gets somewhat unpleasant at times – but the
reader who enjoys this series will have to develop a certain amount of
ability to go with the flow anyway, and I'd rather this than have an
ultra-sanitised version of 1920s Melbourne where such things just
didn't happen. (It's already somewhat sanitised anyway.)
The backup characters have a great deal to do, especially the
taxi-drivers and hauliers Bert and Cec, and Phryne's maid Dot gets a
good share of the investigative work. Her major participation in the
action is relatively late in the book, and the mysteries themselves
are straightforward as usual.
Enjoyable, and short, but not a book which will grab the reader; my
nostalgia for the first book carried me over the weak spots in this
one. Followed by Murder on the Ballarat Train.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.