Let Him Lie

by Ianthe Jerrold

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 249
Rating:

Synopsis:

Murder begins with the death of a kitten...

Artist Jeanie Halliday is thrilled to move into a country cottage of her own, next door to the home of her dear childhood friend Agnes. But the countryside idyll isn't quite what she might have expected: Agnes is suddenly and unaccountably unfriendly for one thing; and then the neighbours are a little peculiar - old Mr Fone, obsessed with burial mounds; the scandalous Hugh Barchard; and an estranged mother taken to brandishing pistols around.

Soon after the feline victim is found, a shot is heard - the corpse of Robert Molyneux, Agnes's husband, is discovered with a bullet in his brain. Was Molyneux a meddler in sacred places, a secret lothario... or simply a man who knew too much? And how does the unfortunate cat fit in? It will fall to Jeanie to assist the local police superintendent and fit the pieces of a baffling mystery.

I hadn’t come across Ianthe Jerrold before, but her work came up while I was perusing similar books in Kobo Plus, and I’m always keen on trying more classic crime fiction, so I thought I’d give it a go. Let Him Lie falls into the spot in the tradition where ordinary citizens with no aspirations to turn detective end up doing a spot of amateur detection in order to figure out who has actually committed a murder.

I’d say Let Him Lie’s Jeanie isn’t much of a deliberate detective. She tries to find things out mostly out of curiosity a couple of times, but her discovery of the murderer is largely incidental, and she’s not really systematic about the whole thing. It’s almost more of a study of what it’s like to be caught up in the outskirts of a violent crime — but the reader does get enough information to start putting some of it together.

Overall, for me it fell down a bit on the characters, because Agnes turns out to be straightforwardly just a bit contemptible. There’s no real complexity there, and her anguish about being found out for… having a sister who was an actress was way overdone. I believe there were and are people like that, to be clear! I just found it not so enjoyable to read because I kinda hoped she’d get what was coming to her, while also not believing that she actually had anything directly to do with the crime because she’s so ineffectual.

It was equally clear that several other people weren’t likely criminals because they were generally too sympathetic, too unsympathetic, etc — the twist wasn’t clever in that way.

I’d be curious to read some of Jerrold’s other work; it’s not that I think it’s bad, it just wasn’t entirely the shape and tone of mystery I prefer. It’s entirely possible that some of her other mysteries will work better for me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)