Henrietta Hamilton

#AnswerintheNegative #NetGalley

Hamilton is probably a forgotten Golden Age British mystery writer. It's understandable because this is more of a serviceable kind of book than a memorable one. It will help put you to sleep at the end of a work day and it is a safe pool or seaside read that won't absorb the reader's entire attention away from watching out for the kids.

Set in London, involving a clipping firm (a service business gone the way of the dinosaur) grudges, secrets, and light romance, there are no surprising plot twists in store for the reader. The dominant murder trope is the timetable -- where was who when. And the number of corpses is few. The list of suspects get churned over as the story progresses, and one by one the characters (no discerning reader of mysteries would have put on such a list to begin with) are eliminated from it until only the character whom said reader suspected from first meeting is left.

A husband/wife team investigate. They're bland enough to be overshadowed by a couple of the more minor players, especially by an Irish reprobate who would have made a far better heroic investigator, IMO. And that assessment is why this novel is appropriately in the remainder bin of history.… (mehr)

A call for help from the son of an old friend, sees crime fighting duo Sally and Johnny Heldar, investigating a series of poison pen letters at the National Press Archives. But when the victim of these letters ends up murdered, the couple remain on the scene and run their own investigation inconjuction with that of the local constabulary.

The setting for this outing is 1950s London - and today's readers might find some of the themese running through this as a little dated - but that is what you get when reading something that is over 60 years old. London is still bearing the scars of a war which only ended a few years previous.

This isn't the first in the series but there is enough contained within to ensure that you aren't completely left in the dark. An afternoon's escapism.… (mehr)