When life has you wanting a book that is diverting and not too demanding, one of Patricia Wentworth’s stand-alone stories might be the very thing.

This one was just that for me.

The story opens in London, when a woman and a man sit on the same bench very late at night.

Flossie had just taken a new job as a parlour maid. She found herself in a house of four women, the other three being the elderly employer she would never see, the nurse who protected her fiercely, and the book who never left the basement. When Flossie had handed over the old lady’s night-time drink and was on her way back downstairs, she looked into the drawing room. Where she had previously seen a large mirror in a gilt frame she saw just the frame, and she was sure that a human face was looking out from the dark space where the mirror once was. She was terrified and she fled, vowing to never set foot in the house again.

Miles was the secretary to a wealthy American, and he had come to London to look for his employer’s young niece. Her parents had died when she was an infant, nearly twenty years earlier and the family didn’t know what had become of the child. The child had been left a fortune by an elderly relation, and so it was decided that it was time she was found. Unfortunately Miles’ luggage was in Paris, his pocket-book was stolen, the friends who he hoped would put him up were away, and so he wasn’t at all sure what he should do for the night.

Eager to talk about, Flossie told ‘Mr Miles’ all about what had happened to her. He was incredulous, but he found that he couldn’t question her sincerity or her emotional state. They talked together for some time, and then Flossie went home to the aunt who had raised her and Miles set off to untangle his problems and begin his quest.

Neither expected to meet again, but they did; because, of course, the mystery of the missing heiress and the mystery of what happened at that house were closely linked.

A new parlour maid and Miles’s friends would also be drawn into the plot.

There is a great deal of plot, with many twists and along the way, and I was captivated from the first page to the last.

The book is a little over-full, but I really can’t think I would have left out.

There is a large and diverse cast of characters, and each one has a part to play and a story of their own. I would have been happy to spend  more time with many of them; and I would have loved to know just a little more about certain stories that played out in the past or the might play out after the story in this book was over.

Patricia Wentworth had the gift of bringing characters to life, of making her readers care, quickly and efficiently; and she knew exactly which details to share to illuminate them, their lives and their world.

In this book she went right across the class spectrum, without ever hitting a wrong note.

There is much intrigue, wonderful human drama and a good dash of romance before everything is resolved.

I was held in the moment, because there was always something to hold my interest, and that is the best way to read this book. I wouldn’t advise thinking too much about the overall structure, because that reveals many coincidences, much that is highly improbable, and a criminal plot that is downright silly.

This isn’t a book to challenge my favourite Patrician Wentworth stand-alones – the courtroom drama in Silence in Court and and the romantic suspense in Kingdom Lost – but it is a wonderful entertainment and it was definitely the right book at the right time.

In a small English town, a man stands waiting for the lights to change so that he can cross the street and catch his train home. He spots a tea room and, though he knows he will miss his train, he is tired and thirsty and so he goes in search of refreshment.

As he steps through the doorway he is dazzled by a bright light. A man passes him and he is sure that he has seen a ghost from his past. He turns on his heel, all thoughts of tea forgotten, but the man – the ghost – is nowhere to be seen.

He walks to the station, catches a later train and makes his way home.

The man who he saw recognised him, and that would have dreadful consequences.

The opening scene of this eighth Miss Silver novel is a lovely, suspenseful piece of writing, quite unlike anything I have found in any of Patricia Wentworth’s books before.

Michael Harsh died that night.

The inquest concluded that he had died by his own hand. Because he had lost his daughter and his wife, and because his work on the development of a new explosive was complete. A gun was found by his side at the church organ that he often played, the church was locked, and a church key was found in Michael’s pocket.

Sir George Rendel of the War Office disagrees with the verdict, because he knew the man, because he knew how hard he had been working, and because he died the day before he was to hand over his results. He had a young man in his department who had relations living in the the same village, and so he sent him down to make discreet enquiries.

It was soon established that Michael Harsh had been murdered, and that his murderer probably lived in the village. DCI Lamb and DS Abbott were assigned to the investigation and they made a swift arrest. Friends and neighbours were certain that they had the wrong man, one of them was acquainted with Miss Silver, and so she was invited to make discreet enquiries while she was the house guest of an ‘old friend’ ….

The plot that follows is both intriguing and entertaining, and it has it is enhanced by an interesting cast of characters. This is a wonderfully human drama – the possibility of a locked room mystery is dismissed early on and the espionage angle is understated – and that is good thing because that is what Patricia Wentworth did particularly well, and I am not sure that she would have been as good at those other things.

It was lovely to see Miss Silver doing what she does best – talking to people quite naturally and drawing things out of them that they might not have thought were significant, or that they might not have wanted to mention to the police – and the village setting was a nice change. I was also glad to see that she, the police and the other investigators work very well together – for though she might use her position as an elderly lady to her advantage she was never less than professional. And, of course, she knew that giving the police all of the credit and keeping her name out of the papers was the best thing she could do for her future career.

There is a romance in every book and the one in this book was nicely done, but a more complex relationship between two older characters, brought to light by the investigation and beautifully handled by Miss Silver, was rather more interesting.

The war time setting is nicely evoked, the tone is exactly right, and all of the things that regular readers might expect to find are present and correct.

I couldn’t work out who the murderer was for much of the book, but I did settle on the right person well before the end. That wasn’t a problem, because I read the Miss Silver books to watch her at work and to watch the different stories play out, not just to solve the puzzle.

(Ideally, every mystery I read would have an intriguing puzzle and engaging characters, but of a story has to be tilted one way I would always want it tilted towards the characters.)

I found much to love in this book, but I did think that the setting up was stronger than the playing out, and Miss Silver was present at the denouement rather than being the driving force behind it.

That is why I have to say that this is a strong entry in the series – not the very best but more than good enough for me to be eager to start the next book.

 

This story opens on New Year’s Eve early in the war. James Paradine, successful business man and family patriarch, has summoned all of his relations to dine at his country home. They all came, as they always did, but this night did not play out as such nights had in years gone by. When dinner was over, just before that time when the ladies would retire, leaving the gentlemen to their cigars and their port, the host rose to speak. He announced that a crime had been committed, that he knew who was responsible, and that he would wait in his study until midnight, so that the guilty party could come to him and they could put things right.

Most of the assembled company were lost for words and the party soon broke up, with some returning to their own homes nearby and others retiring to different parts of the house.

The next morning, James Paradine’s body was found just below the terrace outside his study where he habitually took the air each night before retiring to bed.

It might have been an accident. The night was dark, the weather was wet, the balastade was low; and so he could so easily have slipped. But of course it wasn’t. The physical evidence clearly showed that James Paradine had been pushed.

One of the things that I have come to appreciate about Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver books, is that her police characters are capable professionals and decent people. That was the case here. The police surgeon quickly advised why it was clear that the dead man had been pushed, and the police inspector who was called out quickly realised that something unusual must have happened that evening and averted the plans of certain members of the family to not mention what had been said at dinner.

The police did everything that anyone might expect of them, but it wasn’t quite enough to confirm any one individual as the perpetrator of the crime that James Paradine spoke about, or as his murderer.

Miss Silver’s involvement came about because she happened to be staying with friends in the area and a young member of the family who was a good friend of someone Miss Silver had assisted in the past and recognised her.

(This isn’t the first time that Miss Silver has gained a new case by word of mouth, and I love the idea that when ladies met socially they talked about the governess-turned- private-detective who had quietly and competently come to the aid of certain ladies they knew or knew about. I believed it too!)

That young lady’s cousin – the young man who would inherit the house, the business, and the position of head of the family – was reluctant to allow a private detective into the family family circle; but he came around when it was put to him that, if the mystery wasn’t seen to be solved, suspicion would blight the lives of everyone who had been in the house on New Year’s Eve.

The mystery story was very well plotted, I came to suspect different characters as the story progressed, and there were many interesting twists and turns before the truth was revealed, and though I noticed that Miss Silver had a number of particular concerns I couldn’t work out how they would fit together and could only sit back and applaud her.

The family story was also strong, and I particularly appreciated the drawing of the character of the two oldest characters. One was a widower who felt the absence of his wife keenly, who could be firm but was always fair, and who would always shoulder his responsibilities. The other was his sister, a woman who felt that life had treated her harshly and who clung to the position in the household that she felt was her due and to the person she loved the most.

There was also much to hold the attention in the stories of the younger characters, including the romance that is present in every Miss Silver story. This one was distinctive in the series, though it reminded me a little of a romance in another Golden Age mystery I read a while ago; in its set-up though not in its resolution. That romance wasn’t as central to the story as it had been in previous books, because this book focused on the house in the country and not a young heroine, but it is significant to the playing out of the mystery story.

I’ve come to realise that while there are common threads running though the Miss Silver stories there is also much that changes and evolves. In this book I noticed a significant change of tone from the last book, and I suspect that was because the reality of the war had become clearer to the author. That is reflected in the story too, very effectively.

All of that makes this one of the strongest books in this series so far

It also makes me glad I set out to read them in order, and very interested to find out more about Miss Silver’s next investigation.

The opening of this book – number 6 of the 32 recorded cases of  Miss Maude Silver – is a lovely example of the things that Patricia Wentworth does best.

It is night-time in London, in the early years of the war, and Meade Underwood is wide awake. The cause was a vivid dream of the young man she had fallen in love with after a whirlwind romance calling her, the young man who had been lost at sea just after they had begun to make plans for their future together. Trying to steady herself she began to count the residents of the house where she was staying with her aunt. It was a very old house that had proved impractical and expensive to run in the middle of the twentieth century, and so it had been converted into flats.

Meade was a classic Wentworth heroine, her situation was beautifully drawn, and I found that I was concerned for her and very interested to see how her story would play out. The residents of the house were nicely diverse, I saw a good deal of story potential, and I remembered how very good Patricia Wentworth was at populating her stories with engaging and believable characters. The setting was interesting, and nicely different from the settings of earlier mysteries.

My hopes of a crime story without the usual romance were quickly dashed. Meade was to learn that her young man had survived but that his journey home had been a long one, as he had suffered a serious head injury and lost much of his memory of the few months before. He didn’t remember Meade, but he was drawn to her and pleased that she knew him and was more than ready to help with his recovery.

There was just one complication – and it was pertinent to the crime story. The young lady who occupied a top floor flat in Meade’s house appeared to have a claim on her young man. He couldn’t believe it, she wasn’t the type of girl he would have been involved with, but she seemed to have compelling evidence to support her claim.

I was drawn into that story, but it wasn’t the main event.

Meade didn’t know that her aunt was being blackmailed, or that when she had seen something that made her suspect that her blackmailer was one of her neighbours she had gone to consult a lady detective she had met at a dinner party – Miss Maud Silver.

Miss Silver’s investigation was at a very early stage when she learned that one of the neighbours her client had spoken about had been murdered. She suspected that the blackmail and the murder would be linked, and so she suggested that she became her client’s house guest. That allowed her to meet all of the residents, and she found that there was a lot going on in the different flats.

A married couple was under a great deal of strain. A young woman so wanted to break away from her domineering mother. A young man was keeping a great deal under his hat. An elderly lady who lived along was behaving rather oddly ….

Each of their stories caught my interest.

The human drama was wonderful and the mystery was intriguing. There were many suspects but no obvious solution.

It was lovely to see Miss Silver drawing information out of different people she met. She did particularly well with the cleaning lady, and the set-up of this particular story made me see how effectively she had transferred the skills of her previous career – as a governess – to her new career.

I was pleased to find that the murder case was being investigated by Inspector Lamb and Frank Abbott. The former appears in a few mystery stories of his own that I have yet to read, and I know that the latter reappears in many of Miss Silver’s cases. I was pleased to note that he was able to recall the words of Miss Silver’s beloved Tennyson at exactly the right moment, and I loved the relationship between Miss Silver and the police detectives. They treated each other as professionals who could bring different things to the investigation. The residents told Miss Silver things they would never have told a policewoman ….

The story was entertaining and engaging, there was always something going on, but I have to say that this is not Miss Silver’s finest hour or one of Patricia Wentworth’s best books.

It doesn’t play fair – particularly when Miss Silver goes off on a jaunt and nothing abut it is explained to the reader – and there are a couple of elements of the story that are rather too improbable.

So this is a book to be enjoyed, rather than a book to be analysed.

Now that I’ve finished it I am very curious to learn more about Miss Silver’s next case ….

Patricia Wentworth was a wonderful spinner of stories, and in this book she spins a story of high drama and romantic suspense with a cast of quintessentially English ‘Bright Young Things’.

It’s a confection – no more and no less!

The opening was wonderfully attention-grabbing.

Our hero, James, worked for a high class London car dealership, and he was fetching a new car for an important customer. Thick fog descended as he was driving through unfamiliar country, and it wasn’t long before he had to admit that he was lost. He caught a glimpse of a big house, and so he set off to ask for help.

He didn’t find help, but he did find trouble.

There were no lights on, there was no sign of life, but the front door was ajar. James went in, hoping to find a telephone, but seeing only a girl whose face is white, whose eyes are wide with horror, and who looks as if she is about to scream. She doesn’t, but she yells ‘RUN!’ and before he as time to react he hears sound of a shot and he feels the breeze as a bullet flies past him. James doesn’t need telling twice. He runs, and between them he and the charming but scatty girl manage make their escape.

Back at work in London he ponders on the puzzle of a girl who was clearly terrified, but completely unwilling to explain any part of the reason why to the young man who helped her. He is still thinking when he bumps into her again, and discovers that he went to school with her brother and that they have enough friends in common to make it surprising that they had never met before; though that isn’t enough to make her tell him any more or to stop her from insisting that it is better for him not to know and that he should stay away from her.

Sally has good reason to be scared, and for speaking and acting as she does, because she is an heiress, someone is after her inheritance and willing to go to any lengths to get their hands on it, and she fears that even her beloved guardian is involved. James won’t be told though, because he is very taken with Sally and because, when one of his colleagues has what looks like a nasty accident, he realizes that whoever fired that gun is trying to get him out of the way too.

There is much intrigue – and a good dash of romance – before a grand finale back at the country house where the story began.

There were moments in the early part of the story, when James didn’t know what was going on and Sally wasn’t going to tell him, when I wished that Miss Silver would put in an appearance. She would have had no trouble working out what was going on and sorting everything out, but of course that would have made this a very short book and it wasn’t long at all before I felt very fond of both James and Sally.

The perspective with James as the protagonist who was concerned about Sally was interesting, particularly when I had figured out what was going; but I think that Patricia Wentworth does best with female protagonists, and while he was eminently likeable he wasn’t as interesting as many of the young women I have met in her books.

(And that reminds me to say the young woman on the cover and what she is doing bear no relation at all to this story.)

I loved the young lady who worked at James’s car dealership, and I couldn’t help thinking that if Miss Silver ever wanted to hire an assistant they would work together rather well.

It wasn’t at all difficult to identify the villains and to understand their motives, and that made me realize what a terrible situation Sally was in and why it was quite reasonable for her to act what she did.

The building blocks of the story were all ones I’d come across before, but the structure that they built was sound. The story was entertaining, it was engaging, and it was suspenseful to the very end.

There was a certain amount of silliness and much that was a little too unlikely – especially towards the end of the story – but there was enough substance and enough intrigue to keep me turning the pages to the very end.

Patricia Wentworth wrote much better books –  of the books I’ve read, Danger Point/In the Balance is my favourite investigation with Miss Silver and Kingdom Lost is my favourite stand-alone story – but I did enjoy my time with this confection of romance and suspense.

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.

I had intended to make steady progress through Patricia Wentworth’ Miss Silver mysteries, but I was distracted from that plan when one of her stand-alone novels caught my eye. It sounded quite unlike any of her other books that I’ve read, it sounded a little like a certain other book that I loved, and it sounded far too good to resist.

It sits somewhere between a golden age mystery and romantic suspense, and I would say that the vintage cover that proclaimed it as a ‘romantic adventure’ got it about right.

What I want to say is that this is the story of the most spirited and engaging heroine you could ever hope to meet.

Valentine Ryven was born on an ocean liner and she was shipwrecked on a small island in the South Seas not very much later. She was picked up and carried to safety by Edward Bowden, a distinguished scholar taking long and rambling holiday after working much too hard.

Edward was wonderfully resourceful, salvaging a great deal from the wrecked liner and harbouring the islands natural resources. He also educated Valentine and brought her up to be ready to take her place in the world he had left behind. He was sure that one day another boat would pass by to rescue them; but he prepared Valentine for the possibility that he might die before that day came.

This story begins some twenty years later, when a young man named Austin Muir came ashore and heard a young woman reciting Matthew Arnold. He was amazed and when Valentine recovered from her initial fright she was thrilled that she was being rescued and that she would have a chance to meet more people and to see so many things that she had only been told about by Edward.

Austin had been sent ashore by his employer, Nicholas Barclay, who had set out to find the island not on any map  that one of his ancestors swore he had discovered.  He was delighted with Austin’s discover, he was charmed by Valentine, and when he saw the papers that Edward had told her to present to her rescuer he knew who she was straight away.

Valentine was the missing heiress to a vast fortune!

Barclay took Valentine home via a Caribbean island, where he bought her clothes, shoes, and all of the other accoutrements a young woman going home to England should have. Valentine was delighted with it all, and she was smitten with the two very different men who were taking her back to her family.

It didn’t occur to Valentine for a minute that her family might not be pleased to see her.

She didn’t know that society had changed a great deal in the years since Edward left England.

Helena Ryven – Valentine’s aunt – was very correct and proper. That was a shock to the warm- hearted Valentine, who had been so looking forward to having a family she was sure she would love and would love her back.

She thought that the problem might be that she was disinheriting Helen’s son, Eustace, and so she offered him as much of the estate as he wanted. She explained that she needed very little to be happy, that all she needed was food and shelter and the lovely countryside around her. Her offer was rejected out of hand!

When she saw the wonderful work that Eustace was doing, restoring run down properties and looking after poor families in the East End of London, she knew that she had to find a way for him to carry on. She realised that the answer was simple – she and Eustace should be married and then everything that was hers would be his.

She loved Austin but he had rejected her – explaining that their family backgrounds. She didn’t understand but he stood firm, and after that it really didn’t matter who she married.

Her proposal was accepted.

Valentine tried to be happy but she couldn’t.

She loved the warm family home of Aunt Helena’s elder sister, Ida Cobb. She loved spending time in the country cottage where Aunt Helena’s younger brother, Timothy Brand, lived with his soon to be married half-sister, Lil. But she knew that Aunt Helena – a knitter who thought that wool-winding was an excellent occupation for her niece – would never understand her, and that she would never quite understand Aunt Helena. She also began to suspect that Eustace wanted to marry another woman, and that he was marrying her from a sense of duty.

She could never quite fit into the role life had given her.

As the wedding day drew nearer she knew that she couldn’t go through with it, but she wasn’t sure how to get out of it.

And one or two things happened that made her think she was in danger ….

I found so much to love in this book.

Patricia Wentworth is always good at clothes and in this book she must have had a lovely time writing about the joy Valentine found in so many lovely things in her new world.

She understood Valentine so well; and she created a wonderfully diverse band of characters to populate her world.

Eustace’s work in London gave the story just enough serious underpinning.

And I should say that ‘Kingdom Lost’ was not so like that certain other book – ‘Miss Ranskill Comes Home’ by Barbara Euphan Todd. They had similar beginnings, they had some themes and ideas in common, but the two heroines and their stories are different and distinctive.

I loved – and can recommend – both!

This particular story was improbable but it was so engaging; it rang true logically and emotionally.

I really didn’t know how the it would play out, and I so wanted to know, I was so concerned for Valentine, that I had to turn the pages very quickly.

There was romance, but I couldn’t even predict how that would play out.

Some might consider the twist at the end of the story to be a little too convenient, but I loved that it had the roots in the very first pages of the book, and it made me realise that Patricia Wentworth had plotted very cleverly.

Most of all, I loved spending time with Valentine.

I’m thinking now that maybe I should alternate Miss Silver books and Patricia Wentworth’s other stories ….