Friday, May 12, 2017
Lost in the snow: Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed
Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed (1960) One of Peters’ first books. It’s a nicely done closed group puzzle. Isolated following an emergency landing in a snow-bound valley, Antonia Byrnes’ six heirs have to come to terms with her capricious bequests. Which of them murdered her old friend when he was writing a new will repudiating her bequest of almost all her estate to him? Peters is at heart a writer of love romance, and likes to create ambience. She does a good but unnecessarily extended job of describing what it’s like to bring back a person almost dead from a morphine overdose, and a chase through deep snow and almost lethally bad weather. But she draws plausible characters, and gives us a nice mix of clues and red herrings. **½
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
There's No History Here (poem)
There’s No History Here Above Kama Bay This country has no history, they say. Then what’s that breathing there? There are no stories told mo...
-
John Cunningham. The Tin Star (Collier’s, December 4, 1947) The short story adapted for High Noon . As often happens, the movie retains v...
-
Noel Coward The Complete Short Stories (1985) Coward was a very clever writer. All of these stories are worth reading, but few stick ...
-
Patrick Hamilton. The Charmer (1953) Originally titled Mr Simpson and Mr Gorse , retitled and reprinted in 1989 to take advantage of t...
No comments:
Post a Comment