1970 mystery, ninth in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett.
An old woman who was a Bright Young Thing between the wars thinks her
life is in danger, and asks for Tibbett to be her food-taster – and
with all the old "friends" who are now powerful people, she can get
him. So he's right there when she drops dead… US vt Many Deadly
Returns.
Parts of this book feel as though Moyes was trying for a
locked-room mystery. Tibbett has eaten and drunk all the same things
as the victim, and they're all the same things she has for her
birthday every year, so how can she have been killed? Indeed, was
there a murder at all?
Well, since her three horrible daughters will now be sharing the
fortune that her late husband locked up so that she couldn't fritter
it away, probably. But it's all a bit more clinical than the usual run
of Moyes; her greatest strength, for me, is her people, and here
they're almost entirely unsympathetic.
What makes up for that, though, is the way Tibbett's wife Emmy is
involved at every stage of the investigation; I've felt she's been
rather poorly treated in some of these books, but here she's very much
a partner with her own set of skills (she's better at reading emotions
and putting some sorts of information together). Moreover, there's a
very interesting side character. Rather a lot of the plot does perhaps
depend on a particular obscure technical point, but Moyes is clearly
having such fun with hanging a locked-room story on it that I
forgive her.
One of the stronger books in this series.
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