In the Balance

by Patricia Wentworth

Ebook, 2011

Library's rating

Library's review

The fourth entry in the Miss Silver series of ... what? mysteries? thrillers? romances? all of the above? ... finds Miss Silver unusually in the picture from the opening page. She's on a train, where she receives a desperate confession from a beautiful young woman who overheard some gossipy women

claiming that her newlywed husband did away with his first wife to claim her fortune, and is planning to do away with her, too, for the same reason. Despite Miss Silver telling the young woman that she is a detective, the woman does not enlist her help. Ever. Even after multiple additional attempts on her life. At which point, I metaphorically threw up my hands and muttered, "Let her die, then!"

Well, not really. But really, this is the second book already in this series where a woman's family is plotting to kill her and she refuses to raise a finger to help herself. I'm sure Liz can offer some astute commentary about woman's place at the time and so on, but it grated on this reader, anyway, despite many otherwise pleasing elements. Chief among those has to be the setting, a large country estate more or less on the edge of a seaside cliff. It sounded gorgeous and I want to take my vacation there right now. Or at least once the murderers have been swept up and put out with the trash.

I also thought there was less romance in this one than the three I've read so far, even taking into account the multiple murder attempts. These comments might lead you to believe that I didn't like it, but that's not quite true. I didn't love it, but I enjoy Wentworth's writing. Although I wonder what possessed her to conceive of Maud Silver as a series character, given that she has so little to do in each book, as compared with other literary detectives. Anyway, on to the next!

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Description

Fiction. Mystery. HTML:The "marvelous" British governess-turned-sleuth helps a new bride who fears her husband intends to murder her (Daily Mail). Former schoolteacher Miss Maud Silver is on her way back to London when, with a violent shudder of the train, a young woman is thrust into her compartment. She's beautiful, well dressed, newly married, and wealthy�??a lethal combination. In a state of shock, Lisle Jerningham explains that she fled her home in a hurry after overhearing a sinister conversation. Her new husband's first wife died in an apparent accident, and the resultant infusion of cash saved his family home. Now, he's broke again�??and attempting to engineer a second convenient mishap. Miss Silver is unsure whether the drama is real or a figment of Lisle's imagination�??but if this frightened young lady is a target for murder, the killer will have to deal with the governess-turned-sleuth first. Starring a mature sleuth who "has her place in detective fiction as surely as Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot", In the Balance is a classic British mystery (Manchester Evening N… (more)