"Penhallow", Georgette Heyer

I've read all Heyer's historical novels, even "Powder and Patch" and "The Great Roxhythe", but I've only read a few of the contemporary detective stories with which for years she alternated them. I picked up this one expecting a Golden Age cardboard-type mystery in which the criminal is unmasked with a flourish in the last chapter by an improbable coincidence; I don't know if the rest of her detective novels are like that (from what I can gather from the Internet, 'Penhallow' appears to be considered an outlier by any standards), but this one certainly isn't.

It's more like a cross between Daphne du Maurier and Ruth Rendell, a book in which the identity and motives of the murderer are no mystery at all and the author spends all her time depicting the slow build-up of an intolerable situation until someone inevitably cracks, and then exploring the consequences. ( Read more... )