Clues to Christabel

by Mary Fitt

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 289
Rating:

Synopsis:

When successful novelist Christabel Strange dies suddenly aged 32, the bequests are hard to fathom. She leaves one wing of the ancestral home to good friend Marcia Wentworth for her ongoing use; the rest of the house remains in the hands of her mother, grandmother and siblings. Christabel made it known that Marcia would write her biography, but leaves her sixteen volumes of meticulous diaries to wily eccentric Grandmother Strange, who loathes Marcia and refuses to allow her to see them. Dr George Caradew, Christabel's childhood friend, finds himself between opposing and increasingly hostile camps, and begins to wonder why Christabel behaved in such a peculiar way, and whether her death was really due to a fever. The possibility of foul play becomes a certainty when another murder occurs and a volume of the diaries is stolen. Gradually, Caradew pieces together the clues to Christabel's hidden life.

Clues to Christabel was the second Mary Fitt book I’ve read, and again, I really liked it. It’s more a psychological bent than some of her peers, and less focused on dogged police work but more on the people on the outside of that (even if they’re also trying to solve what happened). It really dragged me in, trying to figure out who was sincere, who was a bit of a vampire, and whether scheming meant someone was guilty or merely serving some other end.

The end of the story surprisingly made me turn against Christabel, rather — there’s a certain manipulativeness throughout, a too-good-to-be-true-ness, which left me ambivalent about her, but by the end I had my eyebrows fully raised. I won’t explain why, though: that’s definitely for you to find out by digging through the story. That didn’t change my enjoyment, to be clear: you don’t need to like Christabel, since she’s dead already right from the start.

In the end, I worked out the whodunnit part less by clues and more by certain aspects of the narrative structure, but it was fun to play guessing games all the same.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)