1981 mystery. Virginia Freer runs into an old friend who's planning to
get married; she knew him during the breakup of his previous marriage.
Several people are going to die…
Virginia's estranged husband Felix (a pathological liar and
pilferer) is also there, and as usual Virginia seems to be the only
person who can see through his fantasising—while recognising that a
comforting fabulation can be just the right thing to say when
someone's in distress. The fundamental tension of this series is that
Virginia can't share a life with the utterly undependable Felix, but
they're still clearly in love with each other, and it's particularly
apparent in this book.
There's also a lot of family tension, with Gavin the son who's about
to get remarried, Edward his father who's still running the family
(construction) business, and Hannah the younger sister who's keeping
the house for Edward. And here's where things start to go a little off
the rails for me, because Ferrars falls into the trap that many
writers do of assuming the world hasn't changed since they were young
(she was born in 1907): while this is meant to be happening in the
early 1980s when it was published, the idea that a woman who marries
will inevitably give up her job comes up several times and is
completely unquestioned as the normal way to do things. It really
wasn't, by then…
It's not just the people in the house, of course, though most of the
action (and all the killing) happens there. The bride's family are
market-gardeners who live in a house nearby, and they have their own
curiosities; and there are Edward's friends and business associates,
some of whom may not be entirely incorruptible.
So far so good detective story, and it does work out rather well.
While Hannah may edge towards the "hysterical woman" archetype that
spoils some of Ferrars' early writing, she's not too bad, and at least
has reasons for her oddness. What I found quite strange was Felix's
role in all this: he fancies himself a Great Detective, of course, but
in the end contrives to work out what's happened, work out where they
key evidence must be, and destroy it for reasons which even now
aren't entirely clear to me. (When he destroys the last part, he knows
the culprit is already under arrest anyway, and I was rather amused by
his disgust that the police solved the crime through boring old
witness statements rather than his being able to share his elegant
deductions with them.)
So there's a good satisfying detective story, but at the same time
Ferrars manages to build interesting observations of character and
personality. I've found her very patchy, but I rather enjoyed this
one.