1941 mystery/thriller, fourth in the Miss Silver series. Lisle
Jerningham is newly married, but nervy; someone who knows her
husband's family has been talking meaningly about how convenient for
him it would be if she died in an accident like his first wife, and
she has just had a near-fatal accident… US vt In the Balance.
Clearly someone does have it in for her, but who? There are at
least three candidates, Dale the husband, Rafe his scapegrace younger
brother, and Alicia their cousin (who turned down Dale to marry Sir
Rowland Steyne, but now he's died and she's on the prowl again). Or
could it be all of them in collusion? When Lisle's car crashes, it
might be an accident. When a local girl goes off the cliff, wearing
Lisle's distinctive coat that she'd just given her, it's clearly not.
Miss Silver is here too, after a chance meeting in a train that opens
the book, but her role is as usual mostly to be in the background and
give good advice ("tell everyone your will has been destroyed and
you'll be making a new one") that isn't followed. She barely meets the
principals; that job is given to Inspector March, who is also one of
Miss Silver's old charges.
But mostly, with the lack of anything conclusive to work on, it's up
to Lisle to sort things out for herself; and since she doesn't realise
she's the heroine in a thriller, she makes a major mistake which
almost costs her life. Even so, I found it forgivable: given her state
of mind, given what she does know or thinks she knows, it's a
reasonable thing to do even if the reader is well aware that it must
put her into the hands of a murderer. (I see from other reviews that
not everyone feels this way; yes, Lisle is perhaps a bit wet and puts
up with a great deal, but this is still the era in which divorce was
moderately scandalous (and usually blamed on the woman in the eyes of
the world) and women who chose to be unmarried would be regarded with
grave suspicion. For me, at any rate, she works.)
An extra pleasure for the modern reader is period detail: this is set
in the summer of 1939, and everyone knows that war is coming, but not
how or when. There's an aerodrome nearby for sport flying, and Rafe
has a job related to aviation.
(This book isn't freely available from Faded Page as most in the
series are.)