Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated 3.73 by 33 litizensGenre: krimi.DNA: Brit.
Verdict: By the numbers.
Tagline: True crime made unreal.
Ingredients: wealthy Murray family with many sibs clashing over the dosh, live-in beautiful house-keeper, widowed scion, various grandchildren impatient for an inheritance, and others in the menagerie. Then House-Keepeer is found murdered in a locked room and the mystery begins. The frame seems to fit one of the other servants or a wanna be relative, but does it…. I cannot say because I didn’t finish it.
Slow, wordy, with remote characters.
I went looking for it because I read this author’s historical biography called Machiavelli and His Times (1936), which is more restrained than many other accounts of Machia. The author published many others of this ilk on Florence Nightingale, Oliver Cromwell, and the like. But she also tried her hand at this krimi.
Muir was Dorothy Muir (1889-1977) who used the initial ‘D’ to get through the sexist ceiling at publishers. She took up writing when her husband died young and she needed an income in Edwardian England. Writing was one of the few careers open to a woman and it allowed working at home with her children.
This is one of three krimis in which Muir used a true-crime as the starting point for her story. They might appeal to other readers.