Reviews and Comments

This is a beautiful homage to rural life and the mid 20th century residents of the Apennines, as much as it is a war story. Newby evokes the spirit of the farms, homes, woodlands and peaks until you can feel the smoke smarting in your eyes, and draws the inhabitants with equal skill. Highly recommended

First in a long and well respected series but a little dated, which given my recent reading history is an odd thing for me to say. I'm unlikely to follow the sleuthing banker any further...

A tale of muddy moors, muddy towns, muddy people living lonely depressing lives (and deaths). A grim alternative picture to the Yorkshire of "All Creatures Great and Small"

A tale of muddy moors, muddy towns, muddy people living lonely depressing lives (and deaths). A grim alternative picture to the Yorkshire of "All Creatures Great and Small"

No (extra) spoilers here - the overall premise of the book is well publicised. It's only when you start reading it that the utter confusion of the protagonist(s) worms its way into the reader's mind. It cracks along at a brisk pace, the caricatures of the British upper-crustery are well drawn, and the mystery is, well, mysterious. Well worth a look.

Made it half way through this and stopped reading a couple of months ago. The characters are unappealing and their motivations seem vague and vapid. The premise seemed promising but I just couldn't force myself through it.

The protagonist's misogyny and the contrived solutions to the locked-room mystery left me cold after remembered enjoyment of Dave Warner's earlier efforts.

Finding it a bit hard to get inspired by this. Took a week off to read a 1950's mystery...

...now back to this.

First published in 1865, and billed as "Australia's first murder mystery", Force and Fraud is a well paced 19th century melodrama. The characters are fairly thinly drawn, but the social observations seem (from this temporal distance) accurate to time and place. To the reader the outcome seems obvious from early in the book, and the mystery is only in the minds of the characters themselves. Not a bad read at all, and the biographical notes on the author are a great read in themselves.