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The problem for Detective Inspector Sloan was the autopsy. For the victim, apparently, would have died anyway. Along with the cold cucumber soup, crown of lamb, raspberry cremets and a fine old port, someone had slipped the lord of the manor a dose of deadly poison.
This, the seventh in Catherine Aird's C.D. Sloan mysteries, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. As usual, Aird drops clues all throughout her text, so if you pay close attention, you too will be able to figure out what is going on. Constable Crosby provides his usual comic relief by being the worst and yet the most enthusiastic of police officers.
If you enjoy Ellis Peter's George Felse mysteries, you'll like this series too. If this series could finally be reprinted, I'd be a very happy person. So would you! Hope you can find this book somewhere.
Now, of course, the case belongs to Harpe's friend "Seedy" Sloan and his raw assistant Crosby of the CID, working out who at a dinner for twelve could have poisoned the host without being seen. After attending the funeral, they have another loose end to worry about: the widow, hearing of their presence, fainted dead away, then shut herself up in her room - but it seems more like fear than guilt.
Who would want to murder Bill Fent, a respectable local magistrate burdened with an entailed estate? His next of kin seems to have had a good reason *not* to - both the owner and an adult heir have to work together to break an entail and start turning land into cash, and the Fents had had bad luck in meeting the requirements, what with the World Wars killing off family members at inopportune moments. But *somebody* thinks Sloan can make sense of it; before long, he has a second murder on his hands...
This isn't what I would call a country house party case, although Constance Parva is definitely in the country. The dinner guests were local worthies: the local doctor, his new bride (hence the reason for the party), the old rector's daughter Cynthia Paterson, Quentin Fent the heir, to name a few. Cynthia Paterson alternates with Sloan as the viewpoint character, filling in background information in a gentle way; as a rector's daughter, she's attended far too many funerals to concentrate solely on the service, and contemplates the attendees instead, with some of her father's taste for literature thrown in. (In one of Aird's many references to Italian art, the notion that Charity's opposite is Folly was always good for a sermon. That kind of thing.)
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