I’m not sure what the heck this cover is supposed to convey. I’ve complained in previous posts about the state of cover art these days and I’m going to complain again – often these lazy cover designs are applied to classic mysteries and older books. I don’t know what publishers are thinking these days other than that they need to save a penny or two, but the golden age of paperback covers is dead.

This is one of Heyer’s better books, well-written enough to stand with Sayers and Christie, without the snappy 1930’s movie dialogue that so spoils her other work. This book starts with a house full of suspects, the family of Silas Cane, the victim: his eccentric mother Emily, her loyal ladies maid, and her secretary, Patricia Allison; his cousin, Clement, and Clement’s self-centered avaricious wife, Rosemary; his other cousin, Jim, and Jim’s teenaged half-brother, Timothy. And, lurking nearby, Rosemary’s oily boyfriend; and Silas’s business partner, his wife, sons, and daughter, Betty.

Silas, after dinner with all these people, goes out for his usual evening walk and falls off a cliff. Did his accident precede his heart attack or did the heart attack cause the accident? It doesn’t matter: Clement inherits (with relief) and moves, with Rosemary, into Silas’s palatial home. The business partners demand that Clement make a decision in favor of an Australian distribution agreement. Time is of the essence: the man representing the Australian company can’t wait around locally forever.

But then, just as the Australian rep arrives at Clement’s home-office to present the proposal in-person, someone shoots Clement dead. It all seems too convenient, especially to Jim’s younger brother, an aficionado of American gangster movies. And Scotland Yard agrees, especially as someone sabotage’s the boat and then the car of Jim, the next to inherit the estate and business.

The characters in this book are so firmly themselves, and it brings them into delightful conflict. I think my favorite is between Rosemary, so determined to be misunderstood by everyone who is not on her plane, and the business partner’s daughter, the mother of two young children, whom Rosemary seeks out as a sympathetic ear but who manages to pop her pretensions every time. Rosemary declares how dark the house feels; and Betty sympathetically says she knows just what Rosemary means, the wrong curtains can make all the difference and somehow manages to drag her children’s opinions into the conversation. Then Rosemary goes on to say how hard it is for someone as sensitive as herself to live in such a place; and Betty agrees, stating that her young daughter was demonstrating her own sensitivity to place by doing something commonplace. Hilarious.

It makes you wonder who the author was lampooning.

A fun book to read indeed.