The Listening Eye

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Summary: It's the story, not the solution
Review: Miss Silver is wonderful in this, standing up to the rich and headstrong Mr. Bellingdon. The solution to this mystery isn't difficult or complicated but the story of Paulina Paine and her ability to read lips which leads to knowledge of a impending robbery which leads to murder. The threads are gathered by Miss Silver and she is the leading force behind the discovery of the culprit. Another great. Mostly I enjoy how Wentworth makes people come to life for me. I hope you enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Jewel theft and murder at a country house party
Review: Paulina Paine visited the art gallery only because David Moray, the painter who rents her attic as his apartment and studio, sent her portrait there, titled _The Listener_. She hasn't heard anything since a bomb brought her office down around her in 1942, but she never quite lost the look of listening for what she could never hear again. While resting her feet, she idly starts lip-reading the conversation of a pair of men across the gallery who would otherwise be safe from eavesdroppers - and gets a nasty shock upon learning that they're planning a hold-up, and don't care who's killed in the process of taking something away from a secretary on his way back from a bank. She gets an even worse shock later, upon learning that they noticed her, and one of them saw her portrait, and learned about her name and lip-reading from the gallery attendant.

At that point, she has the good sense to use her connection with the Morays to make an appointment with Maud Silver, governess-turned-PI. Pauline tells her the whole story -and she has an excellent memory for words, although no talent for describing faces. Unfortunately, when she like so many others gets cold feet, she doesn't immediately take Maud's advice and go to the police, feeling that they'll treat her lip-reading as a fantasy. [Oddly enough, Pauline turns out to have been right - for reasons I don't pretend to fathom, Maud's friends among the police really *are* reluctant to believe anybody could have lip-read such a conversation.] The point soon becomes moot, since Pauline is killed by a hit-and-run driver before she could repeat her story to the police. Somebody miscalculated badly there, though; Maud's excellent memory and stern conscience ensure that the matter won't be dropped, and Frank Abbott and his colleagues on the Force respect her enough to face fact when Lucius Bellingdon's secretary is killed while retrieving a valuable necklace from his bank in Ledlington.

Bellingdon engages Maud to go undercover as his new secretary, since the theft required inside information. She balks at this, not being a typist, but this isn't really a problem; he has 2 secretaries, the senior of which was the victim, who was really more of an assistant to Bellingdon - sorting wheat from chaff in his correspondence and so on - while the other secretary is the one required to possess the more usual job skills. Going undercover, of course, presents no problems; her experience as a governess gave her one of her greatest professional assets, the ability to pass unnoticed in a drawing room as well as on the street.

Some really entertaining stuff, apart from the usual well-presented puzzle: Maud's private opinion of what people invariably say when information has leaked, and how little men know about what gossip really goes on; Bellingdon's widowed daughter Moira, who's too much of a Philistine to understand when David Moray wants to paint her as Medusa; Moira's old acquaintance, Moray's neighbour Sally, with her job fielding silly letters to the author Marigold Marchbanks (that part's *really* cute). The characters are far from bland, so this qualifies as a good novel as well as a good mystery.