The blurb:
Three victims, three unsolvable murders, and three killers walk free...
A Dreadful Murder: Kent, August 1908. Caroline Luard is shot dead in broad daylight in the grounds of a large country estate. With few clues available, her husband soon becomes the suspect...But is he guilty?
Chickenfeed: Under financial and emotional stress, Norman Thorne finds himself in a hopeless situation - but does he resort to murder to escape his fiancee's clutches?
Tinder Box In a small Hampshire village, Irish labourer Patrick O'Riordan has been arrested for the brutal murder of elderly Lavinia Fanshaw and her live-in nurse, Dorothy Jenkins. What lies lurk beneath the surface of their world?
This is a collection of three novellas, rather than one story: two are true stories, and the third is fiction.
The murder of Caroline Luard happened in 1908, in the English countryside, and is covered in the title novella. The second novella, Chickenfeed, examines the 1927 murder of Elsie Cameron by fiancé Norman Thorne in Sussex. The third novella, The Tinder Box, is fictional, and follows community outrage and relationships as the brutal murders of an elderly woman and her nurse/companion are investigated.
The novellas are written in something different to Walters's normal style — she's more relaying events than building atmosphere and telling a complex story. She editorialises about the two real cases at the end of those novellas, talking about whether or not the contemporaneous investigation came to the right conclusion or not (she agrees that Caroline's husband likely did not kill Caroline, and disagrees with the jury verdict in the Cameron/Thorne case, believing Norman was innocent of murder — although she does leave one telling detail out, that Norman Thorne had an article in his possession about another famed murder in which the victim was dismembered that does seem to indicate premeditation). It's more reportage than her usual writing style.
By contrast, the third, fictional novella is pure Minette Walters in distilled form: there's the initial take on characters and layers that are then removed through the story to reveal a more nuanced take; there's the constricted setting that forces the characters into conflict. She;s also not limited by historical fact, so behaviour can be tidier and the storyline tighter, with a definite conclusion.
While I haven't been able to get into her later historical novels, I've always enjoyed Walters's crime novels. In this, I enjoyed The Tinder Box more than the other two, I think because of that difference in writing styles between the factual and the fiction.
Started: 28 April 2025
Finished: 1 May 2025
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