This story  begins – as do many of the stories from Miss Silver’s casebook – with a young woman who is not quite as secure, not quite as sure of her position, as she would like to be.

Laura Fane was an orphan who would be coming into a significant inheritence on her 21st birthday, and as that day was drawing near she had to travelled to London, to visit the family solicitor.

I loved Laura from the start. She had grown up in a quiet country home but she loved the ‘bubbles’ and ‘glitter’ of London that she discovered with her cousins and their friends. She had the confidence to make her own decisions and express her feelings and opinions, and she had the grace to want others to understand and be happy.

Laura knew that coming into her inheritance  would force her to deal with a tricky family situation.

Her father had jilted a cousin to marry her mother after a whirlwind romance. The jilted woman had never married, and she continued to live in the family’s country house that Laura owed but had never seen. She was wealthy and wanted to buy the house so that she could leave it to the orphaned niece she had raised; but Laura wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to sell the home that was one of the few links she had with her parents, sight unseen!

Tanis Grey, that orphaned niece was the dark to Laura’s light. She was a young, charming and utterly irrestible femme fatale. I found her a little less convincing as a character than Laura, and I couldn’t quite believe that she wreeked the havoc that she did, but I understood the kind of woman she was very well.

When she was invited to a house party at her own country home, Laura had mixed emotions. She wanted to see the house but she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted her first visit to be in a party at somebody else’s invitation; and she knew that it would uncomfortable that her hostess would want an answer to a question that she would be either unready or unable to give.

Laura did go to the party, she fell in love with the house, and she found herself at the centre of a murder mystery when the Chinese shawl that she had inherited from her mother was used to silence a gun. She was the prime suspect, and she was horribly aware that she might have been the intended victim.

The story  twisted and turned beautifully, and I was completely caught up in it alongside Laura. Even though I knew that Patricia Wentworth always looks after her heroines, there was a real sense of jeopardy because she is so good at holding her reader in the moment.

She is also very good at clothes, and she was able to use that talent to the full in this book. Houses and furnishings were just as well done and I know that I would recognise Laura’s family home and all of the party guests if I was taken there.

Miss Silver was one of those guests, invited because she was an old friend of one of the older members of the family. She wasn’t asked to investigate the mystery, but of course she was concerned, she asked questions, she watched carefully, and she was ready to do whatever she could to help.

She identified the murderer and so did I; but she the evidence led her to her conclusion whereas instinct and my knowledge of Miss Silver’s earlier cases led me to mine. That didn’t matter, because I don’t read Patricia Wentworth’s books for clever plotting and surprising outcomes, I read them to be caught up in a mystery alongside a lovely heroine.

I enjoyed the inevitable romance in this book, and I particularly loved the dash of the gothic in this one.

The psychology underpinning this story isn’t as interesting as it was in the previous Miss Silver book, but it is interesting; and there was more than enough that was right about this book – and not much at all that was wrong – allowing me to say that it is among my favourites to date and that I am eager to read more.