Hades Hath No Fury

This is the second Hilary Tamar mystery I’ve read. Just like the last one, this one was endlessly entertaining and charming.

The Hilary Tamar mysteries revolve around a group of five young barristers in London and their mentor, Professor Tamar. In this one, all five barristers are involved in a probate hearing for a large, wealthy family. The mystery happens when a member of that family is found dead, having either fallen off a roof, jumped, or been pushed. When another family member is lost at sea a few months later, it seems certain that there is something sinister afoot. The suspects include nearly every other family member, all of whom would benefit financially if some of their relatives disappeared.

The format of each book in this series is the same: once the mystery has occurred, the characters spend most of the time sitting around at long lunches, drinking, arguing over the mystery, and invariably reading letters from one of their members who has traveled to distant lands for various reasons. So they’re basically a bunch of people sitting around, gettin’ tipsy and fighting over the case. It may sound dull, but it’s actually pretty fantastic. The letters they read are always hilarious.

One thing I love about these books is that the mystery is always solvable, but there’s no way I would ever solve it before the end. Once you know what happened, you can see all the clues that Caudwell laid out, but I would never in a million years have put it all together. That’s exactly the kind of mystery that I like. I’m excited to read the rest of this series.