Scandalize My Name

by Fiona Sinclair

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 240
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating:

Synopsis:

One the eve of Elaine Southey's 21st birthday, Ivan Sweet has been found dead in his flat in the basement of the Southeys' historic north London home. A slick charmer to some of the tenants and a loathsome young scoundrel to others his death doesn't draw out many tears among the house's residents and neighbours. And yet the sordid truth starts to seep into the heart of their small community a murder is living among them, and who's to say when they might strike again? The shrewd Oxford man Superintendent Paul Grainger finds himself faced with a small circle of suspects whose connections and hidden motives heap complexity upon complexity in this tightly wrought mystery, shot through with a chilling touch of the macabre.

Fiona Sinclair’s Scandalize My Name feels very much on the cusp between “Golden Age” styles of mystery fiction and the more modern gritty crime. There’s a detailed and explicit autopsy scene, which is definitely not something I expected from something in this series, but there’s still a sense of an individual police officer going about the normal beat. Grainger’s not a world away from Lorac’s Macdonald at all, they’re very much in the same mode, even if the story has a lot more gruesome detail.

Overall, I think this one didn’t give enough clues to tie the solution of the mystery in with the rest. There was a rather sudden and very dramatic denouement which revealed the killer, but it didn’t really feel like the plot had got there yet — the denouement revealed the killer, rather than the detective.

There were some interesting character portraits, but I think it mostly felt a bit thin — maybe, as the introduction by Martin Edwards says, because there’s too many characters introduced and used as POV characters, and too much swapping around between them. That said, that doesn’t feel too unusual for a mystery story.

Rating: 3/5