Blood on the Wood (Nell Bray Mystery) [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Set in the early twentieth century when woman's suffrage is still a distant hope, when revolutionary socialists are filled with hope for the worker's utopia, and when women still need to be concerned about their social standing and their chances of being 'ruined,' BLOOD ON THE WOOD is a strangely powerful mystery. Nell Bray is an entertainingly complex character--hard-working for suffrage but realistic enough to know that it will take time and compromise. Her moral dilemma over how much to tell the police rings true. Author Gillian Linscott does a fine job depicting those turbulant times and the characters who lived through them. The suspects--song-hunting dilitante, Daniel; widower Oliver; jilted fiancee Felicia; and too-clever lawyer Adam are all worth looking at--all have motives, all could have benefitted through murder.

If you're looking for a cerebrial mystery with a charming early-twentieth century setting, BLOOD ON THE WOOD is a can't miss opportunity. I enjoyed this one a lot.

It all happened because a valuable painting, bequeathed to the Women's Social and Political Union, turned out to be a fake - commissioned after its owner's death by her husband, Oliver Venn. So, when a splinter group of the Fabians - the Scipians -gathers to camp at the Venn's, Nell decides to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by sounding out the Scipians' commitment to women's suffrage while confronting Venn about the painting.

It's the younger Venn son, Daniel, a collector of folk music, who comes up with the plan that Nell should steal the picture that's rightfully hers. Daniel has also just got himself engaged to a silent, abused member of the agrarian classes, no matter that he's already engaged to quite a nice woman of his own sort. It's the downtrodden waif who turns up dead during Nell's quasi-sanctioned theft.

The historical detail, from ladies' fashions to radical politics, merges unobtrusively with the mystery through the likable and entertaining voice of the intrepid Nell. Her sleuthing skills emerge naturally from her forthright personality, as do her well-reasoned forays into the woods in the dead of night after a killer. A delightful series.

Breaking and entering Mr. Venn's house in the middle of the night proves rather easy. However, the switch is deferred when Nell finds a corpse. Someone murdered the victim and as Nell explains to the constable why she was in the house, she vows to herself to uncover the identity of the culprit so can clear her name.

BLOOD ON THE WOOD is an engaging historical mystery that brings to life the early struggles of the suffragette movement in England. The fine amateur sleuth theme is cleverly enhanced by unpretentious looks at early twentieth century society mostly by the extended Venn family, suffragette sisters, or the heroine. Nell as the center of the tale is the real deal so that the audience obtains a wonderful novel that showcases a bygone period in a delightful way as does the previous Bray books do (see DEAD MAN RIDING and PERFECT DAUGHTER).

Harriet Klausner