Death in the Stocks

Andrew Vereker has been murdered! And his body left in the stocks on the village green! Antonia is a typical smart talking it girl who's glad to see the (stabbed) back of her interfering half-brother after a stern letter forbidding her from marrying her one true love Rudolph. Antonia's languid brother, and Vereker's probably heir, Kenneth, is ordering Champagne for everyone especially his gold digging girlfriend Violet.


It's business as usual in this Georgette Heyer mystery.


Heyer's characters are the same characters that inhabit any Golden Age novel. Her detective (Hannasyde) is cheerful and pleasant, calming the upper class suspects that the local bobbies only serve to agitate with their slow and ponderous ways. The thing that I feel separates Heyer from, say, Allingham or Marsh, is the dialogue. It's fast paced, and snarky, like reading a Katherine Hepburn film.


51 pages in, and it's impossible to give an opinion on Death in the Stocks. It reads as well as the other two Heyer novels I've read – perhaps slightly better as we have only been introduced to four (what I assume will be) main characters so far. The lack of “death at a dinner party” or “death in a stately home” means the suspects are dribbling in for us to get to know one at a time, rather than being dropped onto our lap in a big bundle to remember names and motives as we go.


Following the “least likely suspect” approach, I'll go out on a limb and say Murgatroyd (the homely live-in woman) did it.