Murder Most Unladylike, Robin Stevens
I picked this up because the author had a delightful thread on Twitter, basically. It’s not something I would normally pick up, perhaps, given that it’s sort of middle-grade-ish in target audience — but it’s a mystery story and I was told it was entertaining (and inclusive!) so I thought I’d just go ahead and give it a shot. And it was enjoyable: Daisy and Hazel are at a boarding school and become friends, and this term they’ve decided to imitate Holmes and Watson and become a crime-investigating duo. Daisy considers herself the brains of the outfit, while Hazel is the heart (and more often than not has some smart ideas of her own) and the writer, following Sherlockian custom. When Hazel finds a dead body which disappears by the time she goes back to show someone, they realise they’ve found the perfect case.
As befits the audience, it goes along at a hefty clip, and the mystery isn’t too difficult for the audience to get into themselves. It does a nice job of evoking the historical setting without getting into too much detail, using Hazel’s outsider status as a foreign student to explain what might not be familiar (although it all is if you were into Enid Blyton’s books as a kid, as I was). All in all, it still wasn’t my thing, but it was fun as a change, and it is something I’d happily recommend to someone of the right sort of age and/or interests.
Leave a Reply