RogerBW's Blog

1992 mystery. Helen Lovelace dies peacefully at eighty-eight. But when her surviving relatives turn up, a glamorous Hollywood star and an Australian businessman, one will soon be shot dead and the other suspected of the murder…

There are missing emeralds (but who knew they were fake?), and a foggy night, and soon enough the housekeeper is near-fatally drugged too. There's a mentally-retarded man who may have attacked the star when they were younger (or did she make it up?). Even more than usual in a murder mystery, there are very few firm facts from which to begin the process of deduction.

And of course this is another Virginia Freer book, so the housekeeper asks her to call in Felix (Virginia's separated husband, still a pathological liar) to try to clear one of the suspects.

It's quite an old-fashioned sort of story, with some distastefully old-fashioned attitudes; but Ferrars was 85 when it came out, and frankly seems to have done a better job of adjusting to modern life than many mystery writers who just keep writing in the setting they know from their youth, with the calendar turned forward a few decades. This book effectively evokes a claustrophobic atmosphere while not actually restricting its characters' movements, which is a neat trick.

This seems to have been the last book Ferrars wrote in the series, and there's no resolution to the matter of Virginia and Felix, but I don't really think there was ever intended to be; for all a more modern series might show slow progress of a relationship, I think to Ferrars they were iconic rather than dramatic characters, always on the outs but never either getting back together or taking steps towards divorce.