Unlawful Occasions

Rating:
Summary: Blackmail pays off
Review: Is Mr.Sampson a blackmailer? What secrets does he know? What will he do with his knowledge? All these thoughts are haunting the beautiful Mrs. Verney day and night. When she cannot deal with the assaults anymore she decides to talk to her neighbor Mr. Culsworth, who is a successful lawyer. When he hears her story, he is directly and without reservations committed to put an end to this dreadful and felonious practice. Never did he suspect what the impact of his investigations would be. Not only Mrs. Verney seems to be in trouble, also her would-be savior gets in a mess without equal.

Henry Cecil was a County Court Judge for more than 25 years before he started his life as a full-time writer. This experience has made him perceptive to numerous absurd contradictions in the British legal system. In Unlawful Occasions, written in 1962, he paints with quite some pungent sense of humor the life of a professional blackmailer. Unlawful Occasions is in a sense a detective story, but without any dead bodies. This does not mean that there are no skeletons in the closet, on the contrary.

The strongest point in the book is the unpredictable twist of plot in the end. Combined with the comic genius of Cecil, it makes this book a real treat.