Henrietta Who?

by Catherine Aird

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 248
Series: Calleshire Chronicles #2
Rating:

Synopsis:

A hit-and-run murder unearths a case of mistaken identity in this “well-bred, well written and genuinely superior” mystery by the Diamond Dagger winner (Kirkus Reviews).

Early one morning in the quiet English village of Larking, the body of a woman named Mrs. Jenkins is found in the road. Miles away, her daughter, Henrietta, receives the bad news while working in the university library. Poor Mrs. Jenkins appears to have been the victim of a horrible car accident.

When an autopsy proves not only that this was no accident but also that Mrs. Jenkins had never had a child, young Henrietta’s life is thrown upside down. If she’s not Mrs. Jenkins’s daughter, then who is she? It’s up to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan of the Calleshire police force to bring the murderer to justice—and a sense of order back to Henrietta’s life.

Proclaimed by the New York Times in 1968 to be one of the year’s best books, Henrietta Who? is a first-order English whodunit that’ll keep you guessing until the end.

Catherine Aird’s Henrietta Who? is a pretty typical classic crime story. I found it a bit flatter than the first in the series, with a bit less warmth somehow — especially since it’s weirdly very dismissive about the bond between adoptive parents and adopted children, somehow. Henrietta immediately stops referring to the dead woman as her mother, which threw me a bit. Trauma makes sense, but… I don’t know.

Anyway, the whodunnit was something I worked out from a variety of clues and the way the story was shaped, and doing that was pretty fun — it’s a fair-play mystery, I think, and if you read enough of these you start getting a spidey-sense for it.

Not a favourite, but a pleasant enough read.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)