I Could Murder Her

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 191
Rating:

Synopsis:

Muriel Farrington is a domineering woman who, unfortunately for them, has her entire family living with her in her stately home. She tries, often successfully, to run the lives of her children, her stepchildren, her in-laws, and her husband, and she seems to be despised by all except her husband and one son.

When she is found dead one morning in her bed, the family doctor, who is old, ill, and hasn’t been very able for years, is unable to attend and bestow a certificate, which he would have done without investigation or thought.

A younger, more able and perceptive doctor has to be called in, to the shock of whoever the murderer was, and he does not find the death natural...

I Could Murder Her features E.C.R. Lorac’s series detective, Inspector Macdonald, digging once more into a tense net of family relationships and rivalries in order to discover who murdered their (rather awful) matriarch, who was a bit of a strangling vine. There are a couple of very likeable characters — straightforward, capable, earnest — of the type Lorac’s so good at writing, people with good hearts, and I didn’t guess the murderer this time at all.

It’s possible I should’ve seen it coming, because Macdonald and his subordinate seem to have had their eyes on it the whole time, but I suppose I didn’t really want it to be that character. For all that each book features an almost completely new cast, I can’t help but end up caring about Lorac’s characters, and feeling strongly about some of them.

Whiiiich means that at the end of this book I ended up feeling decidedly uncosy and unhappy, because I didn’t want that person to be the murderer and the effects on all the other characters would be awful as a result. It’s still a good mystery, and a good example of Lorac’s writing; personally it didn’t entirely work because I didn’t want it to end like that, but that tells you something about Lorac’s ability to make a reader care. Even though most of her books stand alone, each one gets me fully invested.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)