Book Review: Gone West by Carola Dunn

Gone West (Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher #20)

By Carola Dunn

Published by Minotaur and Sold by Macmillan, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

This is one of my favorite series, and I’m glad there are so many of them.  I found them about a year ago and plowed through (I think) the first 17 in less than three months.  Then I realized that there were only a few more, so I’ve been reading one every few months or so since, to prolong the pleasure.  In other words, I learned my lesson from reading all 20 Phryne Fisher books in less than three months in 2014 (Dear Kerry Greenwood: When will Phryne be gracing the page again?  I miss her.  Sincerely, Lauren).

Like most long-running series, this one is a little uneven.  Some of the mysteries are convincingly high-stakes, with lots of tension.  Others are slower and even a little dull.  Most of them are fairly quiet country house murder mysteries, and Daisy finds herself involved in the murders because of her friendliness and compassion.  Gone West definitely falls into the country house category, and I suspect some readers will find it slow; the murder doesn’t happen until around halfway through.  I don’t think Gone West will ever be one of my favorites in the series, but I enjoyed it and was ultimately quite invested in learning who the murderer was. 

In this book, Daisy visits her friend Sybil, who is a secretary turned ghostwriter for an author of Westerns, at her employer’s remote home in Derbyshire.  Because the author, Humphrey Birtwhistle, can’t seem to recover from a bout of pneumonia, Sybil is afraid someone is slowly poisoning him and asks Daisy to investigate.  When Humphrey dies suddenly, the eccentric relatives and friends who make up his household are all suspects in his murder.  Of course, Daisy’s husband Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher is called in to investigate, and he brings along his trusty subordinates DS Tring and DC Piper.

Overall, the mystery was enjoyable.  I did care who killed Humphrey, and I particularly wanted Sybil and her paramour, a local doctor, to be innocent.  I had my suspicions about the murderer, but it wasn’t obvious, so Dunn gets points from me for a logical but suspenseful progression of events.  The book is a bit slow—it takes an awfully long time for the murder to happen—and a few of the obstacles to solving the crime are rather artificial (a suspect can’t be located, papers take a long time to go through, etc.).  These are not fatal flaws, though.

If this series has a problem, it’s that it’s getting harder and harder to explain why Daisy is always at crime scenes.  I think Dunn is aware of this, as Alec’s superiors have noticed her frequent involvement and complain about it, but metafictional self-awareness only goes so far (not an English major, you say?  Look it up, say I).  In isolation, Gone West does a good job of this—Sybil is an old friend of Daisy’s who has heard about her sleuthing ways—but how many friends of murder victims can one person know?  However, given how much pleasure I get out of these books I’m willing to continue suspending disbelief if it means I get more books.