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edb14 's review for:
Death in the Stocks
by Georgette Heyer
Oh, Heyer. Why do you keep insisting on writing mysteries whose solutions are as obvious as possible?
Though Heyer forces in references to the difficulties of the case from all of her detectives and suspects, the actual solution begins to rise to the forefront of the reader’s mind about half way through the book, and every character’s careful avoidance of casting any aspersions on the culprit in order not to bring them to the reader’s attention makes it even more obvious who Heyer’s “surprise” murderer will turn out to be. With no great twists and turns, the villain is irrefutably exposed and, like bad actors in a play, the characters marvel how they never would have suspected and how clever the murderer’s plan was. It is supremely unconvincing, but it is a fun short mystery for all of that. Though this is unfortunately one of the novels whose tropes have been left far behind in the dust by the swiftly evolving mystery genre, I’m sure that at the time the reveal would have been a decent attempt at a twist. The really interesting questions are dealt with in the first half of the book, such as why the murderer put the body into the stocks in the public square of a village. There are some fun things to like about this book, and Heyer enjoyed the brother-sister characters so much that she transplanted them wholesale into the Regency era for Venetia, but otherwise there is nothing particularly remarkable about this mystery.
Though Heyer forces in references to the difficulties of the case from all of her detectives and suspects, the actual solution begins to rise to the forefront of the reader’s mind about half way through the book, and every character’s careful avoidance of casting any aspersions on the culprit in order not to bring them to the reader’s attention makes it even more obvious who Heyer’s “surprise” murderer will turn out to be. With no great twists and turns, the villain is irrefutably exposed and, like bad actors in a play, the characters marvel how they never would have suspected and how clever the murderer’s plan was. It is supremely unconvincing, but it is a fun short mystery for all of that. Though this is unfortunately one of the novels whose tropes have been left far behind in the dust by the swiftly evolving mystery genre, I’m sure that at the time the reveal would have been a decent attempt at a twist. The really interesting questions are dealt with in the first half of the book, such as why the murderer put the body into the stocks in the public square of a village. There are some fun things to like about this book, and Heyer enjoyed the brother-sister characters so much that she transplanted them wholesale into the Regency era for Venetia, but otherwise there is nothing particularly remarkable about this mystery.