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In this "exceptional" British mystery by a Gold Dagger winner, an aging aristocrat and her longtime lover explore the dark events of their shared past (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Lady Lucy Vereker Seddon is dying of a terminal illness when something she hears on the radio reminds her of her younger, darker days and inspires her to question her dearest friend and former lover, Paul Ackerley, about his role in a series of past family tragedies. There was the strange death of Lucy's brother-in-law, the brute Gerry Grantworth, in the Yellow Room of Blatchards--the huge and ugly Vereker estate--and the subsequent destruction by fire of the sprawling manor house. And then there was the infamous Seddon Affair, the sordid scandal that rocked Great Britain in the midst of the Suez Crisis. Surprised to hear that the woman he has always loved suspects him to be the culprit behind these events--especially since he always assumed Lucy herself helped engineer them--Paul suggests that they each record their memories and compare them. By doing so, perhaps they will both find their way to the long-hidden and terrible truth. Told through an alternating series of memories and flashbacks, The Yellow Room Conspiracy brilliantly re-creates a post-war era and a world of privilege corrupted by greed, jealousy, lust, and lies. The astonishing Peter Dickinson, one of Britain's greatest suspense novelists of the late twentieth century, ingeniously wraps a love story around a mystery and once again solidifies his position alongside luminaries such as P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Peter Lovesey, and Reginald Hill.… (more)
User reviews
This book was phenomenal. This is my first book by this author, but it most definitely will not be my last. It is well written, the characters are incredibly alive, and the story will hold you in its grip until the very end. This author definitely has a talent for story telling.
I'd definitely recommend it to people who want something way above average in their reading, or to people who enjoy books that span a lifetime. Readers of British crime fiction should absolutely not miss this one. At times the story may seem a bit convoluted, but eventually all is explained and clarified, keeping the reader turning pages. I started this book at 8 pm last night and finished it around midnight because I absolutely could not put it down.
Cracking start, and incidentally the radio gameshow is a great device to introduce us to the dramatis personae. However, the story doesn't quite develop into the countryhouse mystery that you might expect - by the time the reader finds out what the crime is, it's pretty obvious who must have committed it. The pleasure is in hearing their distinctive voices as they tell the story, the portrayal of that post-war social milieu (half people who'd known each other at Eton, half up-and-coming types of dubious reputation), and the relationship between the five Mitford-esque Vereker sisters and their various lovers, husbands, and friends.
Highly satisfying.
Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production. Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.
Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters. Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who later married another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.
The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique.
Coming to it again I was beguiled by the opening scene and impressed by the excellence of
Paul and Lucy, two aging, off-and-on lovers, are in failing health. Bu chance an old scandal was nvolving a death is brought to their attention. Aware that time is running low, Lucy asks Paul why he committed the murder. But Paul has always though Lucy was involved.
What follows is a sort of dual memoir as these two try to retrace events from the period between the wars to 1956. What actually happened all those years ago?
I loved this book. The only reason for not give no it five stars is that I found the ending unsatisfactory.
Highly recommended for an intelligent, out-of-The-ordinary reading experience.
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Fic Mystery Dickinson |