Death by Sheer Torture

Rating:
Summary: For everybody with an "interesting" family....
Review: For everybody with an "interesting" family, this book offers a delightful mystery set against memorable characters. Perry Trethowan is an "everyman" sensible cop coerced into revisiting a past that he had good reason to flee; in order to solve a murder that will embarass him for the rest of his life.

Numerous red herrings ensure that you will not solve the case by chapter three, always worth three stars. The other two stars are for the charaters.

Rating:
Summary: For everybody with an "interesting" family....
Review: For everybody with an "interesting" family, this book offers a delightful mystery set against memorable characters. Perry Trethowan is an "everyman" sensible cop coerced into revisiting a past that he had good reason to flee; in order to solve a murder that will embarass him for the rest of his life.

Numerous red herrings ensure that you will not solve the case by chapter three, always worth three stars. The other two stars are for the charaters.

Rating:
Summary: classic whodunit with a slyly nasty twist
Review: Perry is a London police detective who has, to his immenserelief, been disowned by his upper-class family. The Trethowans mightbest be described as cut-rate Sitwells or Mitfords: a poet, a painter (long deceased, and the only one with any real talent), a composer, a set-designer, and a Nazi sympathizer -- plus their various offspring, all living in a monstrosity of a country house. When Perry's father (the composer) is found dead on a torture device of his own design, our detective's immediate reaction is: "That is just how one of my family would die, and just how one of my family would murder... I'll be the laughing-stock of the CID for the rest of my life." However, the Scotland Yard brass decide that only a Trethowan can comprehend the mind of another Trethowan -- and so, despite his pleas, Perry is sent back to the bosom of his family to find the killer among them. Although there is very little violence or sex in this book, it's still not your typical warm fuzzy aristo-Anglophile romp either.