The Curved Blades by Carolyn WellsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm giving up on Carolyn Wells and her detective Fleming Stone after this one, though the others I've read in the series were probably not as good as this. It does present an apparently baffling murder: an ill-tempered, vain middle-aged heiress dies in the middle of the night, and is found the next morning strangely garbed and with all her jewelry on. The suspects include her much put-upon niece, social secretary and business manager, who all live with her and suffer the rough side of her tongue on a regular basis.
Fleming Stone is called in to investigate, and, uncharacteristically and rather foolishly, falls in love with the niece, who is beautiful and significantly younger than him. She's also ill-tempered and high-handed (not compared with her aunt, but compared with an average person), and not particularly sensible or capable, so I didn't care about the romance; I have to like both characters in a romance to have any investment in them getting together.
I figured out who was behind the murder about halfway through, and basically how it was done before the three-quarters mark, even though a key feature of it was not well prepared for in the description of the victim's character. There's a rescue late in the book that is set up to be almost impossible, but ends up being super easy, barely an inconvenience.
It's another one of those classic mystery books where the journey is better than the destination, but in this case the journey isn't amazing either.
View all my reviews
