Skip to main content

What's in a Name challenge review #4: A Knife at the Opera

Although the What's in a Name reading challenge places no restriction on whether or not you own the books you read, I decided to try to use only books I already owned - preferably ones I had not already read - in fulfilling the challenge. This proved somewhat difficult, as it turned out that among my 700+ TBR books I only owned one book that had an item of cutlery in the title, and in the rest of my library there was just one other book with such a title. Its funny, considering I own over 200 cookbooks and you would think that I might own at least one with either spoon, fork, knife or chopsticks in the title. 

As luck would have it, at first I could only find the book I had already read (The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean), but when I began hunting for the book with the number in the title I had decided to read, I instead found the TBR cutlery book, which is a good thing because I hadn't planned to reread the other for another couple of years. 

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me your thoughts about it?


What's in a Name challenge category: An item or items of cutlery.

Author: Susannah Stacey.
Series: Superintendent Bone, #2.
Genre: Murder mystery.
Published: 1988.

Synopsis:
Charlotte, daughter of series detective Superintendent Bone, attends an all-girls' school where they are putting on a performance of The Beggar's Opera. One of the teachers, who was to have performed one of the roles, disappears right before the performance, and a girl steps in at the last minute. 

After the performance, the teacher is found stabbed to dead in the classroom she was using as her dressing room, in the arms of her weeping former lover, who is also a teacher at the school. As Bone was in the audience at the time, he of course becomes the primary investigator of the murder. As the investigation winds on it becomes clear that while some people liked the victim, she was one of those people who are flighty in their personal relationships and have a deep need to win people over and then drops them. This has won her several enemies, but did any of them hate her enough to kill her, or was it perhaps a stranger?

This is the second book in a series and is clearly and annoyingly intended to be read as such - either that, or the authors (there are two) have written the book while keeping certain things from the reader, because Bone and his assistant, D.I. Locker, are simply dropped into the narrative without even the smallest introduction, as if the reader is already supposed to know them well. After that, little snippets of information about them - mostly Bone - trickle in, but not nearly enough for one to form any opinion of either of them. About all I knew about them after finishing the book is that Locker has an infant at home and Bone loves his daughter very much, is a widower, his daughter is disabled after the same accident that killed Bone's wife and son and put father and daughter in hospital, and that he is blond and is considered good-looking by the girls at the school. The best fleshed-out character in the book is his daughter, Charlotte, who isn't even one of the sleuths. Bone could be a puppet or a paper doll, and Locker is the merest sketch of a character, insubstantial and bland. 

The story is nicely plotted, but the only thing drawing me on in the narrative was the desire to know whodunit, and I knew that a little past the halfway point of the story, which is unfortunate, because the big reveal is clearly supposed to be a surprise twist. This isn't a bad little mystery, but there is nothing outstanding about it and to be honest, if I hadn't been in need of finding a book to fill this challenge category, I wouldn't have bothered reviewing it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme