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Fiction. Mystery. HTML:When a suicide seems suspicious, governess-turned-sleuth Miss Silver steps in to assist Scotland Yard. Frank Abbott's vacations never last very long, and his trip to Field End is no exception. He has hardly enjoyed a moment of Jonathan Field's hospitality before tragedy strikes. A niece ventures into old Jonathan's study at night to ask him a question, and finds him stone cold with a revolver by his hand. An obvious suicide, it seems, but Inspector Abbott is not so sure. He asks his friend Maud Silver, the brilliant detective, for assistance. She agrees it must be murder. But who is the killer? Assisting their investigation is the dead man's strange habit of fingerprinting all who come to visit. But there are fingerprints all over the house, and solving this murder will require Miss Silver's particularly delicate touch..… (more)
User reviews
As is often the case in this series, Maud Silver is nowhere to be seen in the opening chapters of The Fingerprint. Instead we get the lay of the land through the eyes of Frank Abbott, who as a friend of a guest staying at the country home of Jonathan Field is present when the seeds of Field's eventual destruction are sown. The setting of the village of Deeping is familiar to readers of the previous The Eternity Ring, and Miss Silver's previous acquaintance with some of the characters from that book makes her entry into the murder investigation here more believable. For an elderly former governess who never stops knitting as long as her eyes are open, Maudie gets around!
It seems at first the impetus for Field's removal is an age-old one: He has recently re-made his will to leave the bulk of his considerable estate to Mirrie, a young woman who is a distant relative only recently discovered and brought to live at Field End. Her elevation in status has come at the expense of his beloved niece Georgina. There are other suspects, including the stepson of another distant relative and any of the people who attended the dinner dance where Field told a provocative story about his peculiar hobby of collecting fingerprints. Field claimed to have been trapped in a building collapse during the Blitz with a man who confessed to two murders but then vanished when rescuers came. Did the mystery man find out about Field having his fingerprint and come to cover his tracks for good? Or is this just a case of good old-fashioned family greed?
Miss Silver and Inspector Abbott get to the bottom of the case, as always, but this isn't one of those mysteries where the culprit is revealed in a dramatically staged scene. Instead, we follow along as Abbott and Maud figure out who done it and then work to gather enough evidence to enable his arrest. But someone desperate enough to kill won't go down without a fight ...
1. I don’t know whether Miss Silver simply was not coughing as much or whether I just managed to ignore it, but it certainly didn’t irritate me as much as in previous books.
2. There were several elements that reminded me of Christie’s plots
Very typical of the Miss Silver series, which I happen to enjoy.