Book review: Taken at the Flood

Aka There is a Tide. Our Ag again, and once again decent, but despite a good start not her best: the ending does not resolve as smoothly as it should.

The plot driver is as ever money; this time we're just-post-WWII, money is tight amongst formerly gentlefolk, rationing is still in force, and some people back from the war no longer fit into the pleasant Olde Englishe countryside as they once did. All of this is quite nicely sketched. That the characters are somewhat stock is no great flaw.

Wiki will tell you the plot, so I won't bother. Spoilers ahead.

I managed to guess that Major Porter was lying about the body being Underhay. But this part doesn't quite work properly. Rowley contacts Poirot, who then conveniently finds Porter, but Rowley doesn't know that Poirot knows Porter: Rowley knows about the wartime scene in the club from Jeremy, but Jeremy wouldn't know that Poirot was present. Also Aunt Katie visiting Poirot becomes rather pointless (and makes no sense, because Underhay is supposedly not a spirit, so can't have communicated). Having Porter then top himself is plot-device rather than plausible (and having a service revolver result in a nice round hole rather than blowing his head messily off isn't plausible either).

The swap of Rosaleen for Eileen is fun and I give her that; it also adds the delightful comedy of both sides of the blackmail unsure who the other is.

Enoch Arden's death turns out to be accident. But it occurs when he is struck hard enough on the chin to be knocked over and hit the marble mantlepiece; this would definitely leave traces on the corpse, and whilst that is said initially, it is carefully never mentioned again and this is not reasonable. The happy ending at the end of the book depends on the police accepting Eileen's death as murder, and Enoch's as unexplained; yet really, would they be ready to so quietly drop the inquiry?

All the stuff with the various phone calls was messy and over-complicated and I think should have been better; perhaps just omitted.

The final scene with Lynn telling Rowley she realised she really loved him when he started to strangle her and is now his woman is tasteless to modern sensibilities, even mine; reading reactions to it on Goodreads is amusing.

Book review: The Body in the Library

The Body in the Library is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in 1942, sez wiki, but don't read that, or indeed this, unless you want spoilers. I enjoyed it; it is pleasingly baffling but in the end nicely resolved.

We start with a dead girl, or rather woman, Ruby a dancer, found in the library of Colonel Mustard. Eventually it turns out that it is even in the wrong library, which is witty but I think not quite plausible. After some investigation occurs we have a second dead body, in a burnt-out car in a quarry, this one a schoolgirl. Eventually - I think I realised this just a little before Miss Marple reveals it - we discover that the two bodies have been swapped; this neatly links the two apparently unrelated deaths, as well as invalidating all the carefully contrived alibis since the time of death is no longer what it was.

The cost of this is to make the evil culprits able to murder a perfectly innocent schoolgirl - for no reason but alibi -, on top of the dancer-come-golddigger Ruby, who is more plausibly murderable. That seems quite a lot to ask. Note that by the use of language we are lead to think of one as a woman and another as a girl, which makes it less likely in our minds that they could be swapped.

Once Miss M has worked out the swap, it would be natural to get the girl's parents to ID "Ruby"s body; this inexplicably isn't done, but would have made all the police work a good deal simpler. Ditto, I think, re the bitten fingernails; it was remiss of Miss M not to share this earlier.

Oh, and also: Josie, staring at the body of "Ruby", radiates anger. But - as she well knows - it isn't Ruby, it is Pamela, so there is no cause for anger, only sadness.