This is one of Marsh’s last books. It’s a difficult book to review because of the racist tropes that the author uses while attempting to criticize racist views. She was 79 at the time this book was published  – should we forgive her for being set in her views?

The story revolves around the visit of the President of a mythical African nation, Ng’ombwana, to London. President Bartholomew Opala is an Oxford-educated lawyer, who is also a boyhood friend of Inspector Roderick Alleyn, and he’s known to Alleyn as “The Boomer.” Because there have been earlier attempts on Opala’s life in other countries, the British government is especially concerned about the visit, and the Special Branch enlists Alleyn to keep a close watch on his friend. Meanwhile Alleyn’s artist wife, Troy, is given the honor of painting the official presidential portrait of Opala.

Alleyn and Troy attend a ball at the Ng’ombwana Embassy and are nearby when the Ambassador is murdered with a ceremonial spear. Of course, several questions arise: Was the murderer really supposed to kill The Boomer, not the Ambassador? And who among the invited guests and embassy staff is the murderer?

Other characters in the book fall into two categories: the trustworthy and the suspicious. One of the trustworthy is Samuel Whipplestone, a retired member of the Foreign Service, who is familiar with Ng’ombwanan politics and who has recently adopted the cat, Lucy Lockett (pictured on this cover).   And of course the usual Scotland Yard crew are there: Inspector Fox and detective-sergeants Bailey and Thompson, as well as Superintendant Gibson of the Special Branch. The suspects include a group of people who happen to live in the same neighborhood as Whipplestone: a retired Colonel and his wife, once stationed in Ng’ombwana when it was a British colony, and a brother and sister named Sanskrit, who currently run a pottery factory but who formerly had a business in Ng’ombwana. There are also several suspects who live in Whipplestone’s own building: Mr. and Mrs. Chubbs, a couple of servants who work part-time for Whipplestone and occupy the floor above him, and Mr. Sheridan, who lives in the basement flat.

There are some nice twists and turns in the story, and in the end justice is served. President Opala, racist stereotypes aside, turns out to be a wise leader, and Alleyn a good detective as always. I think some people will enjoy this book for its plot and others will find the inherent racism too offensive to overlook.

I’ve done it! I’ve read all of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series.

Ruth Rendell wrote her Inspector Wexford series from 1964 to 2013 – that’s an amazing time span. (By comparison, Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series ran from 1956-2004 and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series from 1973-2011; both of those series had many more entries though.)  Rendell (1930-2015) was better known, perhaps, for her psychological mysteries, some written as Barbara Vine, but I most enjoyed the Wexford mysteries set in “Kingsmarkham”, Sussex, England. There are 25 in all.

The last three on my list were The Babes in the Wood (2002), End in Tears (2005),  and Not in the Flesh (2007); somehow I’d read the later books in the series at an earlier time. And all 3 of these made my Top Ten books of the year (2 in 2024 and 1 in 2025).

[For earlier discussions of Rendell’s books, see my articles on A Sleeping Life and Another Golden Age.]

Remarkably, Rendell kept her characters consistently interesting and the stories quite distinctly different over the years. In End in Tears, for example,   there are a dizzying number of things going on. Even Wexford remarks on that: “…[this] I’d call the biggest red herring I’ve come across in my whole career…There may have been a crime, but it wasn’t the crime we were investigating.” Conversations like this between Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and his friend and second-in-command DI Michael Burden are frequently my favorite part of the books.  And Wexford is a very human character, with his beloved wife Dora, his daughters Sylvia and Sheila and their various mates and children, all of whom he has occasion to worry about.

Cheers to you, Ruth Rendell, aka Baroness Rendell of Babergh!

I’m so sorry to report that the mystery world lost Peter Lovesey in April 2025. Since my original post in 2020, he wrote 3 more Peter Diamond books: Diamond and the Eye (2021), Showstopper (2022), and Against the Grain (2024). Showstopper made my Top Ten list, and I’ve yet to read Against the Grain. As I’ve done with other authors whom I’ve loved and lost (e.g. Reginald Hill), I may wait awhile to read the final book in the series.

But I’m so grateful for the many hours of delightful reading that he gave to the world and to me.

The murder took place at a prosperous sheep farm known as Mount Moon, owned by Arthur Rubrick and his wife Florence.  Florence, called Flossie by some, was an outspoken member of the New Zealand Parliament; one night she disappeared, only to have her body found several weeks later, wrapped in a bale of wool, in the storage room of a textile company. When Alleyn arrives, it’s a year later and the New Zealand police have given up on the case.

Alleyn interviews the people closest to Flossie: her nephew Douglas Grace, her ward Ursula Harme, her secretary Terence Lynne, and her husband’s nephew Fabian Losse, all of whom live in her house. (Her husband Arthur, who was in poor health, died a few months after Flossie’s murder.) Each of the four gives an account of the events of the night Flossie disappeared. Several of the farm workers are interviewed as well, including a young protegee of Flossie’s who is a gifted pianist. The characters’ views of Flossie herself are very disparate, though most agree that she was opinionated and outspoken.

There was, for me, a bit too much about the process of shearing sheep. Marsh, the daughter of a bank clerk, didn’t grow up on a farm as far as I can tell, so this must have taken some research on her part. But as Alleyn says at one point: “They’re New Zealanders, dyed in the wool, and they understand.”

The solution to the mystery isn’t a great surprise, but arises logically from what has come before. And as always, Alleyn is a very human detective, missing his wife Troy and his colleague Inspector Fox, and caring about the eventual outcomes of the people he encounters in his work.

I greatly enjoyed this book!

Best of all, there is a puzzling murder to solve. How was William Andersen, playing the Fool, decapitated during the yearly tradition, the Dance of the Five Sons, while crowds of onlookers watched? Was it indeed one of his five sons who killed him? Who else had a motive? It’s all explained at the end, of course. But not till page 300.

There are some pitfalls for the modern reader, most notably in the language. One character apostrophized. Other characters carried lanthorns. William Andersen is referred to as the Guiser – which is finally explained on page 117 as meaning “The Disguised One.” (I had to look the other two terms up. Who knew that ‘lanthorn’ was just an alternate term for ‘lantern’?)

Some people will take issue with Marsh’s characterization of Ernie Andersen’s state of mind as due to his epilepsy. Others may find her depiction of the Germanic (but anti-Nazi) Mrs. Bunz as insulting. And once again, the spinster in the story, Dulcie Mardian, is portrayed negatively. (The doctor explains that she is ‘eccentric.’ “Typical spinster’s hallucination. Dame Alice thinks she waxes and wanes emotionally with the moon. I’d give it a more clinical classification.”)

I was puzzled by the names of the Andersen siblings. They are Andrew, Bess, Christopher, Daniel, Ernie, and Nathaniel. Nathaniel? Why? As a fan of the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which preceded this book by two years, I wanted ‘Nathaniel’ to be something like ‘Frank’. At least I wanted to be given an explanation for his naming.

But these are minor quibbles. Mostly I found Death of a Fool to be a really enjoyable, classic mystery.

When a murder does occur, Alleyn is there, asking questions, checking timetables, interviewing witnesses. Eventually, he is joined by his usual sidekick, Inspector Fox, and his assistants Bailey and Thompson.  There are suspects aplenty: an alcoholic landlord, his aloof but beautiful wife, a doctor, Willy’s parents, and a shopkeeper who has made a healthy profit from the tourists. 

Like Roberta Gray in Death of a Peer, one of the central figures in this book, Jenny Williams, is a New Zealander living in England. But this seems arbitrary: Jenny is a former teacher of one of the characters (Willy) and the love interest of another (Patrick) and could have been from anywhere. The courtship of Jenny and Patrick is barely shown anyway. And as in Overture to Death, Marsh is very unkind in her treatment of  ‘spinsters’ – who are described as sexually frustrated, petty and vindictive – though Miss Pride is, of course, an exception.

Once Alleyn has identified the murderer, there is a chase through a storm, which was meant, I assume, to be exciting but actually comes across as a little dull. Dead Water is an otherwise entertaining mystery.

For one thing, there is a connection to drug trafficking, with illegal substances coming in from Marseilles. Marsh doesn’t seem comfortable writing about drugs and drug addicts, as shown by the characters from When in Rome.  Roderick Alleyn and his constant associate, Inspector Fox, have many long discussions of the European drug trade, which seem forced and are mostly boring. And Alleyn’s manner when he withholds an addict’s “fix” until he gives information seems uncharacteristically harsh, but perhaps his concerns about his son make this understandable.

Despite the fact that Ricky becomes infatuated with the already-married Julia Pharamond, there’s not much charming banter around the Pharamond dinner table, as one would have expected in an earlier Marsh mystery. Instead, there is a lot of physical hardship for Ricky, who is nearly drowned, then beaten up, and later sufficiently wounded to need hospitalization. Late in the book (page 247 in copy), Julia identifies herself as a Lamprey by birth, which recalls the great fun of the earlier (1940) Death of a Peer, but nothing comes of this.

At long last, when it appeared that the last 20 pages were racing to a dazzling Golden Age finish, Marsh threw the ending away. So a disappointment in all ways.

This time around, the action occurs among the friends and family of Lady Bantling, nee Desiree Ormsbury, a slightly scandalous but likable woman who has had three husbands: first the late Lord Bantling, then a lawyer named Harold Cartell from whom she is divorced but with whom she remains on fairly friendly terms, and a somewhat younger man, Bimbo Dodds, who was saved from bankruptcy by his marriage to her. Her son by the first husband is a young artist named Andrew Bantling, who falls almost immediately in love with a young woman named Nicola (conveniently a friend of Inspector Alleyn and his wife Troy). Harold shares a household with Mr. Percival Pyke Period, a well-known author of etiquette books. Other important characters are Harold Cartell’s sister, Connie, and her adopted “niece” Mary (known as “Moppet”) and Mary’s disreputable boyfriend Leonard Leiss.

Desiree and Bimbo give a party that features a treasure hunt, and as the party ends, one of the characters is found murdered. Several people have good motives for the murder and Alleyn must sort through them to solve the crime. Marsh lived until 1982 and would write several award-winning mysteries after this one, but Hand in Glove is a pleasurable, formulaic mystery – nothing special.

A word about book covers: there seem to be at least a half-dozen different covers for this book. I chose the one above because it shows a pair of gloves, even though they are very different from the heavy leather gloves that figure into this story. The one that puzzled me the most was one, shown below, with a calendar open to the month of April – what did that have to do with the story? I looked at the book again, searching for any mention of April. Finally I found it: the first paragraph of the book has Alfred, manservant to Mr. Period, tear off the March page of the calendar to expose a new page showing a young girl smirking through some apple blossoms. It really doesn’t figure into the story at all. Is it possible that the cover artist read only the first paragraph of the story before designing the cover??

Usually, Marsh introduces the characters in her stories with charming, even funny, vignettes. (See for example, Death of a Peer, reviewed here.) A murder occurs, and only then does Alleyn make his appearance. In Scales of Justice, we are introduced to four families of “gentry” (as opposed to the “ordinary folk”) living in the town of Swevenings on the Chyne River. First and foremost, there are the Lacklanders (three generations: Lady Lacklander, her son George – whom she has to remind constantly not to be “an ass” –  and his son Dr. Mark Lacklander). Next there is the Cartarette family: Colonel Cartarette, Rose, his daughter from his first marriage, and his second wife Kitty. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, who lives alone with his many cats, and Commander Syce, retired from the Royal Navy and suffering from lumbago, whose main pasttime is archery, complete the picture. Mark Lacklander and Rose Cartarette are in love. Syce once killed (accidentally, he claims) one of Phinn’s cats with an arrow. And there is an intense rivalry over catching an enormous trout called “The Old ‘Un.”  The ‘scales’ in the title refer to the fish.

A murder occurs, and the body is found by Nurse Kettle, the “district nurse” who is administering care to both Lady Lacklander and Commander Syce.  (The role of district nurse seems to be a position unique to the UK, Australia and New Zealand.) Lady Lacklander insists that Alleyn, who is gentry himself, be the one who is called in to solve it. Alleyn and his sidekick Fox arrive on the scene on page 90, and fairly soon Alleyn seems to know who the murderer is.  He tells Fox several times that he knows, but he never shares any of his thoughts with the reader. The story continues for another hundred pages, and new facts emerge about these people who thought they knew all about each other. Eventually the murderer is revealed and it is no great surprise.

Readers who are unfamiliar with books from the 1940s and 1950s may find it jarring how often someone in the book ‘ejaculates’ – meaning ‘exclaims.’ 

I learned new things about fish scales from this book, but nothing else was very memorable.