"Death in the Stocks"

No, it's not a book about Wall Street. The kind of stocks we are talking about in Georgette Heyer's "Death in the Stocks" is/are the kind that used to provide public humiliation as punishment - the person being punished would sit with hands and feet locked in the stocks on the village green, open to the jeers, insults and general harassment of anyone passing by. In this case, a body is discovered locked in the stocks one night - the victim of a murder. This 1935 mystery is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to it here. It is also my entry this week in the My Reader's Block blog Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge.

Georgette Heyer wrote more than fifty books, many of them Regency romances. She also wrote classic traditional mysteries - many of them quite funny. That's the case with this one: the victim, a thoroughly unpleasant man, turns out to have been cordially loathed by most of his eccentric family. Suspicion falls rather naturally on two younger members of that family. Each is convinced the other one did it, and both do everything they can to mislead and misdirect the long-suffering police assigned to the case. As Superintendent Hannasyde complains, "She doesn’t appear to conceal a thing. It’s the same with her brother: you don’t know whether they’re very clever, or completely innocent, or a pair of lunatics." You'll have to read it to decide which of those assessments is correct - it's funny, well plotted and thoroughly enjoyable. If you would prefer an e-book version, there's an Amazon Kindle version available..

Comments

[Bev@ My Reader]

I absolutely love the humor in Heyer's mysteries. Some are better than others--this is a particularly good one, I think. I just re-read it a little while ago for the Georgette Heyer Reading Challenge.