In a small village in southern England, an unpleasant rich woman is murdered. No shortage of suspects: Mathilda Gillespie had a lot of enemies, many of whom were intricately bound to her by blood, lies, or both, and many of whom end up disliking our protagonist almost as much. That protagonist is Sarah Blakeney, a local doctor whose mild kindness to Gillespie is inexplicably rewarded by inheritance of her whole massive estate. Hence the dislike and suspicion: those who think they ought to inherit are rarely well-disposed to those who in fact do.
I’ll come back to the protagonist in a minute, but I just want to dwell a little on the genre. You might call this Dorset Gothic. There’s a lot of murky stuff happening in these quiet villages, especially among the posh, who care so much about social appearances and will do all sorts of terrible things in the name of keeping them up. You can probably guess the sorts of things we’re talking about: incest, child abuse emotional and physical, drug habits, wild teens with dubious beaus, etc etc. As it all piled up, I did wonder if it wasn’t perhaps too much: you don’t have to hit every one of the beats. But there’s undeniably atmosphere, dark and claustrophobic.
Now, I mentioned a protagonist, and ostensibly we do have one: that fortunate doctor. But it’s more complicated than that. It’s never quite clear who’s in de facto charge of driving forward the murder investigation or indeed the plot: Blakeney, or the actual police detective assigned to it, or less often some other characters, variously seem to be doing the work. This lack of clarity is in part because the close third person point of view of the book keeps changing. We look over the shoulders and inside the minds of lots of characters, and the various bits of information that come together to solve the mysteries of the book accumulate gradually in our mind, but not at the same rate in their minds. It’s a really neat device and really nicely done. It’s especially effective when we learn a fact from one character, then switch to the point of view of another, who, ignorant of the fact, confidently thinks or acts speculatively about it and gets things badly wrong. This happens a few times. It’s a smart way of highlighting the hubris of the imperfect characters that one’s drawn.
They are indeed all imperfect, none more so than Blakeney’s tenuously estranged artist husband, who rather unfortunately turns out to be the best of them all: the dashing hero when needed, the best navigator of the moral byways, the smartest deductive cookie. Why unfortunately? Well, because all this is ostensible, on the surface of the authorial intention: but the actual action goes against the grain, and reveals Blakeney as really a bit of a knob. It’s like Walters developed a crush on the character that blinded her to what she was actually writing about him. This adds to the faint sense of social conservatism that lingers around the novel: we can have a feisty female protagonist, but in the end, the husband sorts things out. We can also have slightly tedious ethical discussions around issues like abortion.
All this is minor complaint, though. I enjoyed the book and I wouldn’t mind a little more Dorset Gothic sometime.