| It's 1929 and the members of
the Robert Barnaby Society are staying at a hotel for a meeting.
New committee member Linda Dexter is going to make a speech,
but the night before she vanishes. Is it cold feet about speaking
in public, or has something more sinister happened? When her
burnt out car is found nearby and then Linda’s body
is found on the railway track it looks like a simple case
of suicide, but fellow member Frances Black is unsure. With
her new friend Tom Dod in tow, the pair decides to discover
if Linda really did kill herself, or whether she was murdered.
This series debut paints a convincing picture of life in rural
England after the First World War. It is a time of spare women,
families coming to terms with lost members and everybody coping
with a different world than the one they remembered from before
the war. Linda is a woman on her own after her husband left
her for somebody else, and like many of the other characters,
she is looking for her place in society. Robert Barnaby is
a fictional children’s writer whose work the members
are all supposedly fans of, but while some of them clearly
are most use it for other reasons. Love affairs, a chance
to show off, make friends or fill the time are the usual ones
and the sleuths have to sift through it all to find a reason
for murder. The book started a bit slowly as the author did
not attempt to describe many characters’ physical appearance
and a lot of people were all introduced at once. Also, it
was hard to get interested in “Robert Barnaby”
when we are told so little about him. We soon understand that
for many members it does not matter much what the society
is about but as this is not true of everybody it would be
good to know a bit more. Once the detecting starts the book
takes off and becomes quite a page-turner as Laura and Tom
chase around digging into the past. Like the golden age mysteries,
the author is clearly a fan of this book is all about detecting,
but there is also plenty about the period and Laura comes
to life as a character to care about. I would read another
and look forward to seeing how the characters develop.
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