[Book Review] Silent in the Grave

Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn, Mira Pub., 2007

Picked it up, expecting it to be a cheezy romance novel to while away 20-25 min. waiting at Walgreen's. While, yes, a romance develops after the death of the heroine's husband on p. 3., it wasn't a Regency-era bodice ripper, it was a rather witty murder mystery set in 1880, England.

It is very difficult to write well in the first person. Raybourn pulls it off very nicely. It's first person from the same person all the way through. The most enjoyable part was simply the heroine's style of explaining this part of her life. Desperately waiting for someone else in the family to drop dead so that her aunt will leave her alone and go haunt the next bereaved widow.

The murder in question is the husband, who is written off as 'natural causes'. Despite a plea from a business associate of her dead spouse about the un-naturalness of it, Julia blows him off, dreading the impending year of 'mourning'. Obviously, she comes around, and the rest of the novel is the investigation into the death/murder. It is almost completely based upon deduction and implied evidence, since they can't very well exhume the body.

The only thing that was really disjointed, and possibly just too-21 Century, is the social mores and attitudes of the main characters. Would a young woman really be so blase to discover her older sister's "companion" is actually her live-in (female) lover? Were condoms really so accessible? For all I know, the depiction is accurate - it just doesn't seem like it - but, as this is the backdrop of the story, it wasn't big problem.

Do they fall in love? Will it be fulfilled or leave them in their separate social castes? Do they find the murderer, and how in the world did the man drop dead so fast?

All in all, a pleasant afternoon's light reading with much more intellectual activity than "Highlander's Bride" or some such rot with gross looking long-haired, bald-chested men on the book cover.

rating: get it at the library.

Elizabeth's book rating system:
1 - go buy it in hardback, 'cause you'll read it repeatedly
2 - sure, go buy it, you'll definitely read it more than once
3 - borrow it from a friend/library
4 - if it's lying around your friend's summer cottage, and you're bored, might as well read it.
5 - they do take books in the recycling bin, don't they?