Preamble
Take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Review
It’s been a while since I reviewed something that I learnt about on the fantastic Death of the Reader podcast, which seems to be currently in abeyance, but they made the story sound like such great fun that I was happy to jump in partway through the Rachel Savernake series. This is book 3 of 5, so slap bang in the middle of the series. At this point, the characters are normally settled, developing their rhythm, not yet being over-stretched or redirected for character development, and
The 1920s and ’30s are not my period, but feature heavily in so much historical crime fiction that perhaps they need to become my period! Edwards includes an intriguing “clue-finder”, which is a fun Golden Age device less common these days, about which Edwards has written an interesting article.
In this third adventure, then, Rachel is on the trail of journalist Nell Fagan, who’s become fascinated with her own historical crime: the 1606 disappearance of a man from a locked cottage in the Yorkshire village of Blackstone Fell, and then a further disappearance in 1914. Nell comes to investigate in the hope that it will restart her journalistic career. Instead, she’s found crushed to death on the fell.
I confess I’ve never been to (on?) a fell, but am often attracted to them by tales of fell runners. In Edwards’ novel, the fell is mined for its gothic allure, complete with a looming tower. Meanwhile, the small village has all the usual charms of this sort of Golden Age village setting: a wealthy landowner gobbling up more properties; a suspicious sanatorium and a glib young doctor in charge; an eminently unappealing vicar; and a subplot about exposing a fraudulent psychic, driven by Savernake’s usual sidekick, journalist Jacob Flint. Although a fraud, in a way the medium, she, is just another independent twentieth-century woman ploughing her own furrow, like Nell and Rachel.
There is some excellent plotting and superb characters drawn here, and I warmed to Nell and respected Rachel and her ruthless efficiency as an investigator. Edwards is of course a superb novelist and scholar of the genre, and we’d expect nothing less.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
Leave a comment