It’s Tuesday again and I’m continuing my pattern of picking a mystery for Book of the Week fifty percent of the time this year! I was going to say every other week, but it’s not strictly every other week, it does go in patches – a couple of mysteries, a couple of romances, one mystery, one romance – you get the pictures. Anyway: The Wyndham Case.
St Agatha’s College, Cambridge has a collection of books donated to them in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately the books are now completely uninteresting to scholars and come with a lot of strings attached. And on this particular morning they also have a dead body lying in front of them. Imogen Quy is one of the first on the scene in her role as college nurse and isn’t convinced with the idea that it was suicide – or that the dead student was stealing books. And then another student is found dead in the college fountain.
I have been wanting to read the Imogen Quy series for a while, after enjoying Jill Paton Walsh’s Wimsey continuations and during my wanderings post-Word on the Water last week (more on this on Saturday) I bought this. And I’m so glad I did because I really enjoyed it and it was a proper one sitting read for me. In the introduction to that first Wimsey continuation, Paton Walsh mentions that Gaudy Night was one of the reasons why she wanted to go to Oxford and she’s done a really good job in this of creating her on fictional college, this time in Cambridge (which is where she lived). The mystery is pretty good and the collection of students that you encounter feels pretty realistic for the time that it was written (early 1990s). My mum was a solicitor at one point in her life – and she’s done a lot of fundraising over the years, so the complicated bequest of the Wyndham collection was particularly appealing to me as well.
There are four books in this series – and the bad news for the to-read pile is that I know that the bookshop I bought this from has the next two in the series, and it’s pretty easy for me to get back there in the not to distant future! I’m not telling you which bookshop it is in case you get there before me, because I don’t think they’re strictly in print anymore but they seem to be fairly easy to get second hand. And they’re also in Kindle, Kobo and on audio too.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 