欧宝娱乐

Walton has a knack for taking a specific story (such as the utterly splendid Tooth and Claw that uses Trollope's Framley Parsonage and crosses it with dragons, getting a sum greater than both parts) or a storyline (like Arthuriana) and crossing it orthogonally so that both are transformed into something altogether different. And yet one can see traces of each source. Being a visual being, I can only compare it to the color prism we used as kids, when we laid the yellow glass circle over the edge of the blue to make green鈥攚ith the edges of the yellow and blue still showing. Better, perhaps, a palimpsest: one sees traces of old underlying the new, so you get a third effect.

Anyway, she takes the form of the English country house murder mystery, with all its emphasis on rank and manners, and crosses it with an Alternate History. So we open with all the implied tensions between the genteel manners of people of privilege鈥攖heir emphasis on being civilized鈥攚ith a body lying in a bedroom, one of their own done to death by violence. Meanwhile we discover that this England's WW II never really happened, because in 1941 the government, currently led by political conservatives nicknamed the Farthing Set, made peace with Hitler.

The chapters alternate between two POVs. There is the first person account of Lucy Kahn, daughter of the ultra-conservative Farthing Set (named after their country house) who dared to marry a Jew. So she's a born insider who chose to become an outsider, because one of the issues, of course, in making peace with Hitler is accepting what he's doing over on the continent. The alternate chapters are third person from the POV of Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard, sent down to investigate the murder. He's frustrated because he senses that not everyone is telling the truth, but he has to parse the body language and tones of people whose upbringing is so different from his鈥攈e's an outsider in various ways forced inside to complete his investigation. Meanwhile, Lucy, who knows the people, how they move and think, is looking at the mystery from another angle鈥攂ecause her husband is the chief suspect. The alternating storyline builds with inexorable (and inescapable) tension as the stakes grow exponentially. Does the mystery get solved? Oh yes, but I can guarantee you are not prepared for the double-echo sonic boom of the ending.