You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
Did not finish. Mystery didn’t start until 100 pages in, and by then I didn’t care. Sorry, Dorothy. There are some charming bits about the British enthusiasm for bell ringing which I adored, but other than that Lord Peter is a passive spectator in the life of a quite uninteresting village.
This book is amazing. Easily my favorite of the Wimsey mysteries so far, and possibly my favorite mystery novel ever. The prose is beautiful, the characters are memorable and endearing, the mystery is properly perplexing, and I learned more about church-bell ringing than I ever thought there was to learn.
I love almost everything about this book. I love the atmosphere, the creepy, yet peaceful milieu of the English countryside. I loved all the church bell stuff (and how it's serious business to so many characters). I love Hilary Thorpe's spunkiness, and the way that Wimsey gives her lessons on how to be him. I love the absent-minded rector and the way his wife mothers Wimsey. I love how Bunter's useful for everything from mail theft to supervising the church ladies' meal preparations. I love all the twists and turns of the mystery. I love the way Sayers labels the chapters and sections with bell-ringing terms. And those last two chapters...man. How do they manage to contain the most adorable and the most disturbing scenes I've ever read?
I'm not entirely satisfied with the murderer's reasoning, and I was a bit confused on a couple points in the ending, but it's a small issue when the rest of the book was so good. I'm a die-hard Peter Wimsey fangirl now
I love almost everything about this book. I love the atmosphere, the creepy, yet peaceful milieu of the English countryside. I loved all the church bell stuff (and how it's serious business to so many characters). I love Hilary Thorpe's spunkiness, and the way that Wimsey gives her lessons on how to be him. I love the absent-minded rector and the way his wife mothers Wimsey. I love how Bunter's useful for everything from mail theft to supervising the church ladies' meal preparations. I love all the twists and turns of the mystery. I love the way Sayers labels the chapters and sections with bell-ringing terms. And those last two chapters...man. How do they manage to contain the most adorable and the most disturbing scenes I've ever read?
I'm not entirely satisfied with the murderer's reasoning, and I was a bit confused on a couple points in the ending, but it's a small issue when the rest of the book was so good. I'm a die-hard Peter Wimsey fangirl now
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Enjoyable solid Peter Wimsey mystery. I had never heard of change ringing before picking up this book. Between Sayers and skimming Wikipedia, I have learned there is a whole culture around bell math lol. I do feel like I would have appreciated the structure of the book and the puns in all the chapter titles more if I had previous knowledge of change ringing. Sayers clearly spent a lot of time on her format and puns and has a lot of strong feelings about bells, but a lot of it just went over my head I think.
I loved the character Hilary and wish she had been in more of the book. I would read the heck out of her and Wimsey solving mysteries together.
There's also some great Bunter and Wimsey moments.
Content Notes: Corpse with no hands. Also there is a character with intellectual disabilities, which means that all of the awkward ways of talking about intellectual disability in those times comes out. The character is generally treated as a member of the community, but has a derogatory nickname - Potty. The detectives also don't pay enough attention to what he has to say even though he has important information just because he has a less straightforward way of talking. This is a common trope of the times unfortunately. Another trope that luckily only very briefly rears its head is the character with the disability being suspected of the murder and it's really only in the context of everyone related to the time period of the murder being suspected.
I loved the character Hilary and wish she had been in more of the book. I would read the heck out of her and Wimsey solving mysteries together.
There's also some great Bunter and Wimsey moments.
Content Notes: Corpse with no hands. Also there is a character with intellectual disabilities, which means that all of the awkward ways of talking about intellectual disability in those times comes out. The character is generally treated as a member of the community, but has a derogatory nickname - Potty. The detectives also don't pay enough attention to what he has to say even though he has important information just because he has a less straightforward way of talking. This is a common trope of the times unfortunately. Another trope that luckily only very briefly rears its head is the character with the disability being suspected of the murder and it's really only in the context of everyone related to the time period of the murder being suspected.
I liked the Idea of the novel and how the author used the sound effects in the plot to bring us to the solving of this mystery!
I don't read a lot of mysteries but for some reason I happened to pick up this one. I'm not sure that it made me a convert but I thought it was pretty good. The Nine Tailors was full of British humor, interesting facts about bells, a picture of the English countryside, and in the end a twist. I think that mystery lovers would enjoy this one.
lighthearted
mysterious
Whew! Finally finished this one. This is one of the weaker entries in the Wimsey series, in my opinion. It didn't hold my interest, and I found the mystery overly convoluted. However, I did like the bells and how they figured in, and the last few pages of the book almost made up for the slog through the rest of it.
My first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and it was so enjoyable. It's the kind of story I read a couple pages at a time as I was falling asleep each night. Don't think this means the story was boring, just pleasantly paced without requiring me to stay up all night to solve the mystery. I also loved the bit of insight into the history and culture of the church bell.
This is my first book of Dorothy Sayers, though I've heard a lot about her, and I found it a mix of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. It was a good book when it came down to it, but it went by a lot more slowly than I would have planned for.
Lord Peter Wimsey is a man who likes solving mysteries and he and his man, Bunter, stumble across this one quite by chance. This is the eleventh in the series but it was the first one I read and I wasn't lost at all. This is a great standalone book and I wasn't lost at all in who the characters were or their backgrounds, though I'm sure more will come up when I read further books in the series.
In this novel, Lord Peter breaks down outside an English village of Fenchurch St Paul just after Christmas. He is invited to take part in the bell-ringing and gets involved in the village life, along with the nasty influenza that is going around the village. This nasty bout of flu means that when someone wants to be buried with their wife, the woman's grave is dug up and they discover a man's body halfway down. Lord Peter is called back to investigate this mystery and find out who the man is (though be warned Lord Peter isn't involved in the murder until just over 90 pages in).
There are a lot of characters in this book as the mystery is tangled up with an event that happened in the village so many years earlier. It becomes easier to keep track of all these characters, though I will say this book requires concentration at times. I had to go back and reread certain points as I missed who a person was and what they were talking about. There were all sorts of little events going on in the background with the characters and they felt incredibly realistic. It also went very nicely with the setting of the post-WWI English village as they were still reeling from the effects of the war but they were starting to regain their equilibrium and carry on.
The mystery, on the other hand, kept me guessing right up until the end. There was not only the mystery of who the man was, but how he came to be buried in the grave, who put him there and how he died in the end. I loved the twists and turns of the mystery and how wonderfully everything slotted together. I marveled at how Dorothy Sayers managed to interweave the two mysteries, who killed the man in the grave and what happened to the emeralds, completely seamlessly and I loved what happened at the end. I could not even begin to guess the ending, especially how the man died, and it was only until Lord Peter found out that I could even begin to guess. It was a horrible way to die, I will say that, but a very inventive one nonetheless.
I enjoyed this but I have to say I found the information about bells quite hard to swallow. It got very technical at times and I just accepted that I wasn't going to quite understand and moved on in the story, rather than try to figure it out. This book is also a product of its time and there is some mild anti-semitism near the start of the book, though I couldn't remember anything else coming up later.
However, I did really enjoy this book and will be checking out more books in this series (and not just because my mum got very excited when she saw what I was reading). This is definitely a book I would recommend to people who enjoy historical mysteries, especially ones written during the time and were contemporary when they were published. 4 stars!
Lord Peter Wimsey is a man who likes solving mysteries and he and his man, Bunter, stumble across this one quite by chance. This is the eleventh in the series but it was the first one I read and I wasn't lost at all. This is a great standalone book and I wasn't lost at all in who the characters were or their backgrounds, though I'm sure more will come up when I read further books in the series.
In this novel, Lord Peter breaks down outside an English village of Fenchurch St Paul just after Christmas. He is invited to take part in the bell-ringing and gets involved in the village life, along with the nasty influenza that is going around the village. This nasty bout of flu means that when someone wants to be buried with their wife, the woman's grave is dug up and they discover a man's body halfway down. Lord Peter is called back to investigate this mystery and find out who the man is (though be warned Lord Peter isn't involved in the murder until just over 90 pages in).
There are a lot of characters in this book as the mystery is tangled up with an event that happened in the village so many years earlier. It becomes easier to keep track of all these characters, though I will say this book requires concentration at times. I had to go back and reread certain points as I missed who a person was and what they were talking about. There were all sorts of little events going on in the background with the characters and they felt incredibly realistic. It also went very nicely with the setting of the post-WWI English village as they were still reeling from the effects of the war but they were starting to regain their equilibrium and carry on.
The mystery, on the other hand, kept me guessing right up until the end. There was not only the mystery of who the man was, but how he came to be buried in the grave, who put him there and how he died in the end. I loved the twists and turns of the mystery and how wonderfully everything slotted together. I marveled at how Dorothy Sayers managed to interweave the two mysteries, who killed the man in the grave and what happened to the emeralds, completely seamlessly and I loved what happened at the end. I could not even begin to guess the ending, especially how the man died, and it was only until Lord Peter found out that I could even begin to guess. It was a horrible way to die, I will say that, but a very inventive one nonetheless.
I enjoyed this but I have to say I found the information about bells quite hard to swallow. It got very technical at times and I just accepted that I wasn't going to quite understand and moved on in the story, rather than try to figure it out. This book is also a product of its time and there is some mild anti-semitism near the start of the book, though I couldn't remember anything else coming up later.
However, I did really enjoy this book and will be checking out more books in this series (and not just because my mum got very excited when she saw what I was reading). This is definitely a book I would recommend to people who enjoy historical mysteries, especially ones written during the time and were contemporary when they were published. 4 stars!