A Lethal Cocktail (The Woolf & Bell Mysteries)
This is the second of Byrne’s Woolf and Bell mysteries in which he imagines Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell as investigators helping the less than brilliant Sussex police with their murder inquiries. It is not the sort of book Virginia Woolf would have written, but it is a good pastiche of a book that Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers might have written.
A Lethal Cocktail is classic Golden Age cosy crime set in 1929 in Rottingdean, one of the brash new housing developments which sprang up along the south coast of England after WW1. Victim number one is the bride-to-be at a wedding party in a posh new mock-Tudor hotel, who is poisoned by one of the pre-nuptial drinks (actually orange juice, not a cocktail). All the guests have motives for murder, giving us the familiar closed circle of suspects.
Naturally there is a further murder, lots of red herrings, a dramatic denouement in a derelict mill, and the villain is unmasked – and I was completely fooled. If you like Golden Age detective stories, you will enjoy this well-made retake.
