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A review by michelleful
The Crooked Wreath by Christianna Brand
3.0
Read this for a book club, not having read the previous two Inspector Cockrill books. I found myself rather annoyed by the cast of suspects, mostly the family of the deceased patriarch, who were constantly bickering and bantering and went beyond eccentricity into artifice.
There was a locked-room element with each of the two murders and I liked the various theories the family threw out, which were all quite clever; the thing I didn't like was that Cockrill was very hands-off. We hardly see him detecting, apart from prodding the family to make even bigger fools of themselves by crossing from bickering into accusing one another of murder.
Brand's writing style could at times be quite lyrical and full of psychological insight, but taken altogether the effect was rather melodramatic and overwrought.
There was a locked-room element with each of the two murders and I liked the various theories the family threw out, which were all quite clever; the thing I didn't like was that Cockrill was very hands-off. We hardly see him detecting, apart from prodding the family to make even bigger fools of themselves by crossing from bickering into accusing one another of murder.
Brand's writing style could at times be quite lyrical and full of psychological insight, but taken altogether the effect was rather melodramatic and overwrought.