Rope's End, Rogue's End

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 249
Rating:

Synopsis:

Wulfstane Manor, a rambling old country house with many unused rooms, winding staircases, and a maze of cellars, had been bequeathed to Veronica Mallowood and her brother Martin. The last time the large family of Mallowoods had all foregathered under the ancestral roof was on the occasion of their father's funeral, and there had been one of those unholy rows which not infrequently follow the reading of a will. That was some years ago, and as Veronica found it increasingly difficult to go on paying for the upkeep of Wulfstane, she summoned another family conference -- a conference in which Death took a hand.

Rope's End, Rogue's End is, of course, an Inspector MacDonald case, in which that popular detective plays a brilliant part.

Rope’s End, Rogue’s End isn’t one of my favourite E.C.R. Lorac books so far, though when I say that you always need to take into account that I think she was a really great writer. A three-star rating for an E.C.R. Lorac book is always relative (for me) to what I know her best books can be. In this case, she didn’t really exercise her talent for likeable characters, with everyone in the Mallowood family being difficult and argumentative, their relationships always rocky.

What I did think about a lot is that E.C.R. Lorac was careful not to pigeon-hole herself. She doesn’t have a particular character “type” that always turns out to be the villain. There are similarities between the situation in this book and that in Accident by Design — but the similarities are fairly superficial, and not a guide as to whodunnit in this particular story.

As usual, Lorac’s ability to evoke a sense of place does shine through in the portrayal of Wulfstane Manor, though again, it’s not a copy/paste by any means: while several of the characters adore the house, and Macdonald is certainly impressed by it, it doesn’t feel like a happy house, and the sense of wear and dilapidation is what comes through most strongly.

The mystery itself, I worked out the basics of fairly quickly, but figuring out exactly how everything was done was something else.

The main thing marring the experience here is that the Kindle edition is very badly edited. My guess is that OCR was used, but the system didn’t recognise various bits of punctuation (colons and dashes), meaning that sentences don’t always make a whole lot of sense.

Rating: 3/5