3.5
False Scent
ByPublisher Description
Mary Bellamy is the sweetheart of the London stage—everyone simply adores darling Mary. So her fans and friends are heartbroken when somehow Mary manages to spritz herself not with her favorite perfume but with a deadly insecticide meant to be sprayed on the azaleas. What Inspector Alleyn smells is something fishy, especially since everything he learns about lovely, fragile Mary suggests that in fact she was a rather vicious battleax. And with a bit more investigation, he quickly starts smelling something different: a rat . . .
"It's time to start comparing Christie to Marsh instead of the other way around." —
"[Her] writing style and vivid characters and settings made her a mystery novelist of world renown." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesFalse Scent Reviews
3.5
“This is one I really, really enjoyed. I do like Marsh and her assemblage of sleuths, and her persistent inclusion (not in every book, but quite often) of her own abiding passion for theater.
She was quite the person, was Ngaio. She cranked out around 30 books in her Alleyn series, from the 30s to her death in the 80s. While also working feverishly in theater, mostly in New Zealand, where she was very well known for Shakespearian productions.
I like her detective, and his sidekick, who lend a misplaced air of cozy warmth to the brutal narratives she trots out to entertain us. She did a pretty good job of moving at least the lead guy (Roderick Alleyn) through a life story complete with wife and child, and touches briefly on some of the issues encountered by those who pry about in their fellow man's worse impulses.
This story is a nasty little account of the death of one of the leading ladies of the stage, who is, when we meet her, aging in a rather graceless fashion. And then she's done aging altogether. The narrative has an interesting take to offer on how people in the 50s viewed what we would call some point in middle age. It's one of her better books. I didn't have to struggle to pick it up even once.”
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