The House on Graveyard Lane (Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mysteries, 4)
The fourth entry in Edwards’ Rachel Savernake series opens at the Hades Gallery, where Damaris Gethin, an eccentric surrealist artist, has gathered a select group to view her latest exhibition, a tableau of crime, depicted by Chamber of Horrors-waxwork-like human figures, in keeping with Gethin’s macabre tastes and morbid fixations. Rachel Savernake, an avid art lover, has never met Gethin before but is approached by her at the gallery, and asked to solve her murder. Dressed as the tragic queen Marie Antoinette, Gethin places her head in the lunette of her bespoke guillotine, and before anyone can react, snuffs the candles and …. Reflecting on the scene, complete with severed head, Savernake ponders the artist’s unusual penchant for shocking her audiences, and since it is clearly suicide without interference, how does her plea to have Rachel solve her murder fit with the execution they have just witnessed? Just the kind of crime puzzle challenge the unconventional investigator lives for.
Edwards’ series is written in the tradition of the Golden Age Mysteries and supplies clue-finders in the appendix for the reader who isn’t paying attention. The familiar group are assembled—intrepid reporter Jacob Flint, whose interest in socialite Kitty de Villiers borders on obsessive, and Savernake’s unusual companions at Gaunt House—chauffeur and muscleman Trueman; his wife and coveted cook, Hetty; and his sister Martha. Edwards drops these characters into the milieu against which the erudite Savernake can perform her magic. He doesn’t write much exposition, and maintaining that soupçon of mystery behind the Gaunt House residents, aids rather than detracts from a complex plot – a whodunnit with a labyrinthine forest of crisscrossing pathways, which stray far from the obvious. One more to add to an excellent series.
