Helpful Score: 1
Excellent psychological murder-motivations, not physical clues, solve this one.
Polly R. (damerosehay) -
Fine Miss Silver mystery, about village life disrupted by (surprise, surprise) annonymous letters.
Thomas F. (hardtack) -
Once again I was totally at a loss as to who the killer was, until the last few pages. And I was disappointed the killer wasn't the person I wanted it to be. Which is why I only gave it 4.5 stars. :-)
Hopefully, the next published edition will leave Miss Silver out of the story so that my favorite suspect will be arrested, tried and convicted.
Hopefully, the next published edition will leave Miss Silver out of the story so that my favorite suspect will be arrested, tried and convicted.
POISON IN THE PEN by Patricia Wentworth is a classic English village whodunit. Featuring Miss Maud Silver, an English spinster who was a teacher but is now a "private enquiry agent". In this book, a friend who happens to be an Inspector for Scotland Yard asks her to discreetly visit a small village where a spate of nasty anonymous letters has resulted in a young woman's suicide. But that's not the end of the problems.
It's nicely plotted, and if there were clues lying about to be guessed I didn't guess them. You can't read it without comparing it to Agatha Christie (if someone had told me the plot without names, I'd have said "Miss Marple!"), but it holds its own very well. Miss Silver is apparently possessed of a magical ability to inspire confidences from everyone, pretty handy if you're a PI. Of course the attitudes come across as very quaint 60 years later, but you won't cringe at them.
There are some 30-odd Miss Silver books, but this one reads fine as a stand-alone; I expect they all do given when they were written.
It's nicely plotted, and if there were clues lying about to be guessed I didn't guess them. You can't read it without comparing it to Agatha Christie (if someone had told me the plot without names, I'd have said "Miss Marple!"), but it holds its own very well. Miss Silver is apparently possessed of a magical ability to inspire confidences from everyone, pretty handy if you're a PI. Of course the attitudes come across as very quaint 60 years later, but you won't cringe at them.
There are some 30-odd Miss Silver books, but this one reads fine as a stand-alone; I expect they all do given when they were written.
A good old-fashion mystery in the style of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. This is Miss Silver and she knits, too. I really enjoyed reading a mystery without all of the character development. It just concentrated on the murder(s) and the suspects. There were a lot of characters and they came on stage fast at the beginning of the book. It took my a while to keep them straight. I finally got it together at the end. Recommend Note: This is former library book that had been discarded. I took off the library spine labels. All that was left was a 'discard' stamp on the top of the pages and the inside cover page.
