1998 cozy American detective fiction; twelfth and last of MacLeod's
novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max
Bittersohn. A family wedding is complicated by the return of jewels
long thought lost, an unexpected balloon landing… and a dead body.
Like most of MacLeod's late novels, this one harks back to her
very early ones; the theme, and it's stated repeatedly with a heavy
hand, is that Sarah did sometimes quite like her first husband (even
if he was much older than her, not really interested in her as a
person, and utterly under the thumb of his mother) and Max doesn't
feel comfortable about this. It's a bit late in the day to bring up an
idea like that; in these last novels I sometimes think that MacLeod
noticed how much she'd drifted away from her early mysteries with
comic characters into comedy novels with incidental mystery.
There's also an annoying three-year-old boy who doesn't seem to me to
add much to the proceedings, though some people think he's wonderful,
and some shenanigans involving Max being abandoned on a patch of rock
some distance out into the Atlantic that just don't, in retrospect,
make any sense at all. And an "industrial-grade" smoke bomb that
blacks out an entire country house and some area around it for thirty
minutes or more.
It's OK, but the strings definitely show when sensible people do
stupid things because the plot needs them to. Much more one to read to
meet old characters for one last time than as a mystery.
So that's Charlotte MacLeod. (Well, I've found a short story
collection I haven't yet read, but it's all the novels.) This was the
last thing she had published; she had Alzheimer's for some years, and
died in 2005. I'm inclined to split her work into three periods: the
first few books which were trying to be serious mysteries with
unpleasant people in the manner of Christianna Brand or P. D. James,
the middle period in which she was mostly writing comedy, and the last
three or four in which she tries to return to her roots. I think I was
put on to MacLeod by a Goodreads comment implying she was a fairly
serious mystery writer, so I was rather disconcerted by the comedy
that was the main body of her work. All in all: quite fun, but
probably not worth the effort of seeking out.
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