A review by alexlubertozzi
The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

5.0

I read an out-of-print edition of this book and was amazed at how good it was. It's a genre mystery set (and written) in 1938 England. Part of the Nigel Strangeways mystery series, this was written by Cecil Day-Lewis under the pen name Nicholas Blake. Day-Lewis was a poet laureate of England and the father of Daniel Day-Lewis. The Beast Must Die (which, as a title, makes sense when you get to the end--it's from a bible passage--but otherwise makes you think the book is something else) concerns a distraught father whose young son is killed in a hit-and-run accident. The father (a writer of mysteries under a pseudonym) is obsessed with trying to discover the identity of the hit-and-run and driver and exact revenge. The first half of the book is his diary, and the second half is written in the third person and unravels the mystery of what really happened in the diary. Great book, but sadly out of print in the U.S. I'm going to look for the other Nigel Strangeways mysteries.