Sunday, February 07, 2010

Edith Pargeter: Most Loving Mere Folly

I borrowed this thinking I hadn't read it, but it did seem familiar once I'd gotten into it, so I must have. Hardly likely that the library would have anything by Pargeter, a.k.a. Ellis Peters, that I hadn't read. This is a loosely a crime story, but it's more about the people around the crime and what the crime and suspicions do to them. Sort of as though Pargeter was experimenting with the format. It's not terribly successful though, she sort of drenches you in words.

In a small town/village near London, a talented artist and ditto potter lead a supposedly contented married life, until the artist in drunken happiness one night introduces his wife to a local garage mechanic. The wife and the mechanic fall wildly in love. One morning, shortly after finding out about the affair, the artist husband is found dead, poisoned. The wife is suspected, and tried, and acquitted. But one of the two, the wife or the lover, must have done it, surely. So who is it, and is the other safe?

It's not very tense or anything, more into the romantic side. And all might have been easier if the wife's name wasn't Suspiria. Such a mouthful.

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