Ruby Ferguson (1899–1966)

Three daytrippers in 1930s Scotland stop off at a stately home and are shown around by the housekeeper. She relates the story of the owner, Lady Rose- now an old lady, but brought up here.
From an idyllic childhood to growing up...doing the "season" and finding a husband...Lady Rose's magical early years give way to a tense marriage , children...and finally expulsion from "society".
Quite a magical and charming read- I remember seeing it was the Queen Mother's favourite book, and one could picture young Rose as something like Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon..… (mehr)

21/2020. I saw this for sale, realised it was by the "Jill" series author, and couldn't find any reviews online, so I had to read it. Three stars reflects my neutrality. The cover is better than the novel, and even that is ruined by terrible typography.

Blurb: "Inspector Dadoux and Ted Gibbons, son of an old colleague of his at Scotland Yard, investigate the seemingly motiveless murder of Lucie de Vorles, owner of the château at Dousarbres."

Reading notes

From the beginning: too much pathetic fallacy weather. Later: including the first and last lines of the novel!

The place name "Ambriches" is oddly reminiscent of Ambridge.

pg 14. Conspiracy theorist landlady: "The summers have never been the same since the war. And now these sputniks, they break up the rays of the sun before it reaches us."

pg 21. Landlady on the tarot-reading cafe proprietress (who tried to prostitute out her learning disabled granddaughter to the protag): "Also Madame hates the rich. She is Communiste. She says that one day the Communistes will rise up and kill all the rich people, like in the Terror, and that she herself will start here in Dousarbres [...]"

pgs 50-1. This is grimmer than I'd presumed (apart from the murder): the protag falls, with his mouth open, into a boggy pond where the murder victim's body had rotted for a week, then struggles out to vomit on the bank, then discovers he's also bleeding from attached leeches.

About halfway through: I knew this was a murder mystery before I began reading but I wasn't expecting a murder, two suicides, two manslaughters, and an attempted murder, by the halfway mark!

Towards the end: if someone had asked me to do the thing then I would've tested it indoors at my leisure first before going through all that inconvenience and doing the thing (mind you, some men do seem to lose any sense of normative behaviour when they're asked for a favour by a "friend").

In conclusion, that was certainly... a book that I read.… (mehr)