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jakewritesbooks 's review for:
The Franchise Affair
by Josephine Tey
It’s official: I like Josephine Tey. It’s also official: I am not a fan of the classic British mystery novel.
Josephine Tey is yet another writer I’ve been meaning to come back to for a long time. I finished The Daughter of Time in one day, two separate sittings. The premise was simple but the execution took my breath away. I gave myself a headache straining to read from page-to-page.
The Franchise Affair is a slightly more conventional mystery albeit with an interesting twist: a young girl claims to have been held hostage by two women at a remote house called The Franchise. The women, a mother and daughter, are both single with the latter being over 40. Obviously, this led to suspicion that they were lonely and kidnapped the girl for comfort. Only, they claim to have never met her. So they enlist an unassuming local solicitor to help them with the case.
Having read several Agatha Christie novels and others of that genre through the years, I can finally admit I’m not a fan of these kinds of books. The language is too dry, the prose too dense, the thrills often too cheap to wade through everything else. Tey is no different but there’s an undercurrent of emotion running through this that I haven’t experienced from her contemporaries. She really gets the desperation and loneliness these people face and it made me empathize with them more. While I didn’t pour through the pages like I did with Daughter of Time, there was enough here to hold my interest.
The ending is interesting. I’m usually disappointed with endings to mystery novels and this was no exception. However, the way it was done left me slightly less annoyed than I would have felt otherwise. Tey is a fun writer. But it might take me awhile before I try another one of hers.
Josephine Tey is yet another writer I’ve been meaning to come back to for a long time. I finished The Daughter of Time in one day, two separate sittings. The premise was simple but the execution took my breath away. I gave myself a headache straining to read from page-to-page.
The Franchise Affair is a slightly more conventional mystery albeit with an interesting twist: a young girl claims to have been held hostage by two women at a remote house called The Franchise. The women, a mother and daughter, are both single with the latter being over 40. Obviously, this led to suspicion that they were lonely and kidnapped the girl for comfort. Only, they claim to have never met her. So they enlist an unassuming local solicitor to help them with the case.
Having read several Agatha Christie novels and others of that genre through the years, I can finally admit I’m not a fan of these kinds of books. The language is too dry, the prose too dense, the thrills often too cheap to wade through everything else. Tey is no different but there’s an undercurrent of emotion running through this that I haven’t experienced from her contemporaries. She really gets the desperation and loneliness these people face and it made me empathize with them more. While I didn’t pour through the pages like I did with Daughter of Time, there was enough here to hold my interest.
The ending is interesting. I’m usually disappointed with endings to mystery novels and this was no exception. However, the way it was done left me slightly less annoyed than I would have felt otherwise. Tey is a fun writer. But it might take me awhile before I try another one of hers.