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1.0 out of 5 stars
Mrs Malory loses the plot, Mar 11 2002
Hazel Holt's 'Mrs Malory' books have never been detective stories in the classic mould. That is to say, there has always been a tendency to concentrate on the characters, with the crime element growing out of the interactions of those characters.
Nevertheless, the books, numbering ten (up till now) have usually offered a satisfactory read and a reasonable degree of obscurity as to "who dunnit".In "Lilies that Fester", however, Mrs Malory - or rather her creator, Ms Holt - seems to have totally lost the plot. In the first place not only the identity of the murderer, but also the motivation, are clear as soon as the main characters have been introduced. Even the author seems to have realised that all was not well, since a majority of the book simply wanders round and round the same marginally interesting bits of story line and does little or nothing to help in the detecting the culprit.
Indeed, on the final two pages of Chapter Nineteen, Mrs Malory and her son decide that the only reason for bothering to solve the mystery is so that the son's fiancee will feel like agreeing to a date for their marriage. This feeling that the author has lost all interest in her story is further emphasised in the half-hearted denoument wherein the characters decide not to hand the murderer over to the police, nor even to stop him embezzling a regular £1,000+ per week, apparently for no better reason than ... well, quite frankly for no apparent reason at all! It's a daft ending to a vacuous story, and totally inconsistent with the central character's typically 'conservative' thinking and behaviour as depicted in the previous books in the series. On this showing, it's definitely time for Mrs Malory to hang up her magnifying glass and disappear quietly into the sunset.
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